Name: Cabbage Cooked with Pork
Ingredients: ½ pound mixed salt pork; 1 small head of cabbage; Coarse sea salt (to taste)

Why it works: Pork and cabbage work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 919 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cabbage Cooked with Pork

Ingredients

½ pound mixed salt pork
1 small head of cabbage
Coarse sea salt (to taste)

Directions

Cook the pork

Boil the pork gently for 3 to 4 hours.

Add the cabbage

Prepare the cabbage as you would for plain boiled cabbage.
Drain the cabbage well and add it to the pot with the pork.
Boil rapidly for 25 to 45 minutes.

Serve

Serve the pork with the cabbage, adding more salt if needed.

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.

Pork + cabbagetop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together919 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

Mixed salt pork: Long gentle boiling renders its fat and tenderises the meat, flavouring the broth.
Cabbage: Absorbs the seasoned pork broth and becomes soft and sweet as it cooks.

“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.