Name: Cabbage with Sausage
Ingredients: 6 sausages; ½ teaspoon pepper; 1 quart minced cabbage; Salt, if necessary

Why it works: Pepper and cabbage are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,081 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cabbage with Sausage

Ingredients

6 sausages
½ teaspoon pepper
1 quart minced cabbage
Salt, if necessary

Directions

Fry the sausages until crisp and brown.
Remove the sausages from the frying pan and pour off all but 3 tablespoons of the fat.
Add the minced cabbage to the frying pan and cook for 6 minutes.
Arrange the cabbage in a serving dish and garnish with the sausages.

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.

Pepper + cabbagetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sausages: Provide the main protein and rendered fat that flavours the cabbage.
Cabbage: Forms the bulk of the dish and softens as it cooks in the pan fat.
Pepper: Adds sharp, aromatic heat that seasons the cabbage.

“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.