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Cabbage with Salt Pork

A boiled cabbage dish cooked with salt pork, onion, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,001 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cabbage with Salt Pork

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the cabbage and tear the leaves apart.

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

  3. Cut the salt pork into 1-inch pieces.

Cook

  1. Place the pork in a pot with 2 quarts of cold water.

  2. Heat the pot gradually until it boils.

  3. After 30 minutes, cut the cabbage into small pieces.

  4. Add the cabbage to the pot and boil for 30 minutes.

  5. Add the quartered onion on top of the cabbage while boiling to aid digestion.

Finish

  1. Drain the water.

  2. Season the pork and cabbage to taste.

  3. Serve together.

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 + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,001 recipes

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

  2. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

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

  3. Cabbage + porktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together919 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

Cabbage
Forms the bulk of the dish and turns tender and mild as it boils.
Salt pork
Releases fat into the cooking water, adding richness and savoury flavour.
Onion
Adds a mild, sweet aroma that mellows during boiling.

The step that matters

Boiling the cabbage for 30 minutes. This timed boil is what softens the cabbage. Boiling much longer makes it limp and grey, and releases stronger sulfur aromas, so the time should be watched closely.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, onion):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, onion. 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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