Name: Cabbage with Sausage
Ingredients: 6 sausages; 1 quart minced cabbage; 1 teaspoon pepper; Salt, if necessary

Why it works: Cabbage and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,081 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cabbage with Sausage

Ingredients

6 sausages
1 quart minced cabbage
1 teaspoon pepper
Salt, if necessary

Directions

Cook the sausages

Fry the sausages until crisp and brown.
Remove the sausages from the frying pan and pour off all but 3 tablespoons of fat.

Cook the cabbage

Add the minced cabbage to the frying pan and cook for 6 minutes.

Serve

Arrange the cabbage in a serving dish and garnish with the sausages.
Serve with mashed potatoes.

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.

Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,081 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

Sausages: Browning and fat render into the pan, adding savory flavor to the cabbage.
Minced cabbage: Forms the bulk of the dish, softening as it cooks in the remaining fat.

“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.