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Red Cabbage Stewed

A simple stew of sliced red cabbage cooked with butter, pepper, salt, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and pepper 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 ↓

Red Cabbage Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place the sliced and washed red cabbage in a saucepan.

Stew

  1. Add pepper, salt, and butter, with just enough water to cover the cabbage.

  2. Cover the saucepan and stew for 2-3 hours until very tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Shortly before serving, add vinegar and bring to a boil.

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

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

  2. Cabbage + vinegartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  5. Butter + vinegartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Red cabbage
Forms the body of the stew and softens into a tender, spoonable texture during long cooking.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother mouthfeel in the cooking liquid.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps the cabbage keep its red colour.

The step that matters

Stew until very tender. Cabbage is tough when raw, and its fibres only soften fully with long, gentle, covered cooking in liquid. Stopping early leaves the texture firm and chewy, so the full stewing time matters more than the final boil.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Cabbagethe original
  4. Onionfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, vinegar. 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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