Name: Bubble and Squeak
Ingredients: 1 lb boiled salt beef or pork; 1 cabbage; 1 tablespoon coarse sea salt; a tiny piece of common soda (about the size of a pea); clarified dripping (optional, for warming vegetables)

Why it works: Beef and cabbage work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 872 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Bubble and Squeak

Ingredients

1 lb boiled salt beef or pork
1 cabbage
1 tablespoon coarse sea salt
a tiny piece of common soda (about the size of a pea)
clarified dripping (optional, for warming vegetables)

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

Wash the cabbage well in salt and water.
Boil a saucepan of water, add salt and soda.
When boiling, add the cabbage and cook for about 20 minutes until tender. Drain and place on a plate.

Cook the meat

Slice cold salt beef and some fat, and place in a frying pan.
Fry the meat over medium heat until light brown, turning occasionally.
Arrange the meat in the center of a hot dish, cover, and keep warm in the oven.

Fry and serve

Chop the boiled cabbage into small pieces and fry in the same pan for a few minutes, stirring to prevent burning.
For serving, place the fried cabbage and any warmed carrots or parsnips around the dish, with the meat in the center.

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.

Beef + cabbagetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together872 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, once fried, gives browned, slightly caramelised flavour.
Salt beef or pork: Provides the savoury, meaty flavour and fat that help the cabbage brown in the pan.
Common soda: Added to the boiling water, it softens the cabbage and helps it keep a bright colour.

The step that matters

Frying the chopped cabbage. Stirring it in the same pan keeps it from scorching, while enough contact with the hot fat lets its surface brown. Cooking too long or too hot can burn the pieces before they are evenly coloured.

“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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Bubble and Squeak