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A Good Way to Cook Cabbage

A simple dish of boiled cabbage served with egg sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and sauce work together. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 437 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

A Good Way to Cook Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Chop the cabbage.

  2. Cover with boiling salted water and cook for 30 minutes until tender.

  3. Drain well and pour over the Egg Sauce, omitting the eggs.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Cabbage + saucetop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together437 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Cabbage + eggtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,391 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Egg + saucetop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,895 recipes

Egg and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,895 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cabbage
Forms the bulk of the dish and softens into tender pieces as its fibers break down during cooking.

The step that matters

Drain well. Water left clinging to the cooked cabbage would thin the sauce and dilute its flavor, so draining thoroughly keeps the sauce thick and the taste concentrated.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sauce):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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