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Boiled Cabbage

A boiled cabbage dish cooked with a piece of corned beef in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and beef work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 872 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Boiled Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Trim the outside leaves from the cabbage and cut it in half.

  2. Soak the cabbage in cold water for 30 minutes.

  3. Shake the cabbage in the water to remove sand.

Boil

  1. Place the cabbage in a pot with the corned beef and enough cold water to cover it.

  2. Bring to a boil, skim the surface, then cover and reduce to a slow boil for 3 hours.

  3. If the water level drops, replenish with boiling water.

  4. Ensure the water is low before lifting the cabbage.

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 + beeftop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together872 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Cabbage + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + beeftop 37% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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 turns mild and tender during the long simmer.
Sugar cured corned beef
Seasons the cooking water and gives the cabbage a savoury, salty meat flavour.

The step that matters

Replenishing the water during the simmer. Adding boiling water keeps the liquid at a steady simmer. Cold water would drop its temperature and slow the cooking, so the cabbage and beef would cook unevenly.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, beef):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, beef. 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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