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Cabbage, Bismarck Style

A braised cabbage dish with onions, parsley, bay leaves, thyme, and sausages, served on toast with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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, Bismarck Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

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

  2. Parboil the cabbage quarters for 10 minutes, then immerse them in cold water.

  3. Squeeze out the water from each quarter and tie them with string to maintain their shape.

Braise

  1. Place the cabbage in a saucepan and season with salt and pepper.

  2. Add butter, small onions, parsley, bay leaves, thyme, and a few grains of pepper.

  3. Moisten with broth to cover and cook slowly.

  4. When the cabbage is nearly cooked, add the small sausages.

Serve

  1. Once everything is thoroughly cooked, remove the cabbage and place it on pieces of toast, surrounding it with onions and sausages.

  2. Strain the gravy into another saucepan, remove the grease, reduce, and thicken it lightly before pouring over the cabbage.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  5. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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 cooks slowly.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the braising liquid and gravy.
Small onions
Soften during braising and add mild sweetness to the dish.
Small sausages
Add savoury, fatty flavour to the braise and gravy.
Broth
Provides the cooking liquid that gently braises and flavours the cabbage.

The step that matters

Squeezing out the water from the parboiled cabbage. Cabbage holds a lot of water. If quarters stay wet, the braising liquid is diluted and the gravy is thin and watery, and the cabbage may not hold its shape once tied.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, onion, parsley, 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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