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Soup

Cabbage Soup

A soup made with shredded onion, cabbage, stock, herbs, lemon, butter, flour, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Cabbage Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a pot, melt the butter and brown the shredded onion and cabbage, being careful not to burn them.

  2. Drain the browned vegetables and add them to the boiling stock.

  3. In a small bowl, mix the flour with cold water to create a paste, then add it to the soup to thicken.

  4. If using dried herbs, powder them; if fresh, chop them and add to the soup.

  5. Once the vegetables are tender, stir in the lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Serve the soup over forcemeat balls if desired.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

  3. Onion + cabbagetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,001 recipes

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

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

White cabbage
Forms the bulk of the soup and becomes tender and sweet as it cooks.
Butter
Browns the vegetables, adding nutty, savoury flavour from the milk solids.
Flour
Mixed with cold water to a paste, it thickens the stock into a richer body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the soup and balances the sweetness of the cabbage and onion.

The step that matters

Browning the onion and cabbage. Browning builds deep flavour through caramelisation and the Maillard reaction, but scorched vegetables turn bitter, so they should be cooked gently and watched closely.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, lemon, pepper, butter, flour):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Broccolifits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, lemon, pepper, butter, flour. 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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