Skip to main content
Main

Swedish Cabbage Rolls

A baked dish of ground beef and pork mixture rolled in cabbage leaves and baked with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Swedish Cabbage Rolls

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Chop the pork and onion.

  2. Mix the pork and onion with the ground beef.

  3. Add half as much rice and season with salt and pepper, then mix well.

Roll and bake

  1. Parboil the tender leaves of the cabbage.

  2. Roll some of the mixture in each leaf.

  3. Tie the rolled leaves with string.

  4. Place the rolls in a baking pan.

  5. Spread butter over the top.

  6. Bake covered at 350°F (175°C) for almost an hour.

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. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

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

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

  3. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Rice + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Ground beef
Forms the bulk of the filling and gives it a firm, meaty structure when baked.
Cold boiled rice
Absorbs juices and keeps the filling tender and moist rather than dense.
Fat salt pork
Adds fat that melts during baking, keeping the filling moist and richly flavoured.
Onion
Adds aroma and savoury sweetness that blends into the meat filling.
Cabbage leaves
Act as edible wrappers that hold the filling together while the rolls cook.
Butter
Adds fat to the top of the rolls, promoting richness and gentle browning.

The step that matters

Parboil the cabbage leaves. Leaves must be softened enough to bend without tearing, but not overcooked, since overcooked leaves tear and lose their shape during rolling and baking.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, rice, pork, onion, pepper, butter. 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.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipes