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Cabbage Soup À LA Rentiere

A hearty cabbage soup made with beef, salt pork, smoked sausages, and French bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cabbage Soup À LA Rentiere

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Put beef, salt pork, water, and a little salt into a soup pot and bring to a boil.

  2. Skim off the scum and boil for 1 hour.

  3. Add cabbage, carrot, turnip, onion, and sausages.

  4. Boil slowly for 2 more hours.

Prepare and serve

  1. Dry thin slices of French bread in the oven.

  2. Place some cabbage in a soup tureen, pour the broth over the cabbage, and serve.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  3. Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Adds rich meaty flavour to the broth as it simmers slowly.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savoury depth to the broth during the long simmer.
Savoy cabbage
Becomes tender in the broth and adds mild sweetness and body.
Smoked sausages
Release smoky, spiced flavour and fat into the simmering broth.

The step that matters

Skim off the scum. Scum rising at the start of boiling contains impurities that can cloud the broth and taste bitter, so removing it keeps the soup clear and clean-flavoured.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pork, cabbage, carrot, turnip, onion, bread):

  1. Celeryfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pork, cabbage, carrot, turnip, onion, bread. 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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