Name: Stuffed Cabbage
Ingredients: 1 large fresh cabbage; forcemeat balls of chicken or veal

Why it works: Cabbage and chicken work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 436 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Stuffed Cabbage

Ingredients

1 large fresh cabbage
forcemeat balls of chicken or veal

Directions

Prepare

Cut out the heart of the cabbage.
Fill the cavity with forcemeat balls.
Tie the cabbage firmly together and wrap it in cheesecloth.

Cook

Boil in a covered kettle for 2 hours.

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.

Cabbage + chickentop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together436 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh cabbage: Forms the outer wrapper that holds the filling and becomes tender as it cooks.
Forcemeat balls of chicken or veal: Provides the savory filling, which cooks through inside the cabbage while the leaves steam around it.

“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.