Name: Cabbage with Bacon, Family Style
Ingredients: 2 heads of cabbage; 1 piece of parboiled bacon or salt pork; 6 sausages; 2 carrots; 3 onions (each garnished with 4 cloves); 1 faggot of parsley, celery, thyme, and 1 bay leaf; boiling water; coarse sea salt to taste

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Cabbage with Bacon, Family Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Trim and wash the cabbage, quarter it, and remove the thickest part of the stalk.

Cook

In a saucepan, combine the cabbage, bacon, sausages, carrots, onions, and the faggot of herbs.
Cover with boiling water and season with salt.
Bring to a boil, then cover and simmer until the cabbage is thoroughly cooked.
Remove the faggot and onions before serving.

Serve

Place the cabbage on a dish, top with bacon, garnish with sliced sausages and carrots, and pour a little gravy over it.

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.

Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,057 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,053 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,173 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,810 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together4,108 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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 turns tender and sweet as it simmers slowly.
Bacon or salt pork: Adds savoury fat and salty flavour that seasons the cabbage as it cooks.
Sausages: Contribute fat and savoury flavour that enriches the cooking liquid and the dish.
Carrots: Add natural sweetness that balances the savoury bacon and sausage.

The step that matters

Simmer until thoroughly cooked. Cabbage needs a long, gentle simmer to soften its tough fibres and mellow its sulphurous compounds. Stopping early leaves it firm and harsh-tasting, so cook until it is fully tender.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, carrot, onion, clove, parsley, celery, thyme):

Turnipfits better
Parsnipfits better
Leekfits better
Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, carrot, onion, clove, parsley, celery, thyme. 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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Cabbage with Bacon, Family Style