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Cabbage with Bacon, Family Style

A hearty cabbage dish cooked with bacon, sausages, carrots, onions, and herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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

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

  2. In a saucepan, combine the cabbage, bacon, sausages, carrots, onions, and the faggot of herbs.

  3. Cover with boiling water and season with coarse sea salt.

Cook

  1. Bring to a boil, then cover and simmer until the cabbage is thoroughly cooked.

  2. Remove the faggot.

  3. Remove the onions before serving.

Serve

  1. Place the cabbage on a dish.

  2. Top with bacon.

  3. Garnish with sliced sausages and carrots.

  4. 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.

  1. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  5. 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.
Bacon or salt pork
Adds salty, savoury fat that flavours the cooking water and the cabbage.
Sausages
Release fat and savoury flavour into the pot while adding substance to the dish.
Carrots
Add gentle sweetness that balances the savoury fats and salt.

The step that matters

Simmer until thoroughly cooked. Cabbage needs a long, gentle simmer to soften its tough fibres and mellow its sulphurous compounds. Rapid boiling can break the leaves apart and make the flavour harsher, so keep it at a steady simmer under cover.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Turnipfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. 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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