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French Cabbage Broth

A bacon and root vegetable broth with sweet herbs and brown sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

French Cabbage Broth

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Boil the bacon in the water for about 1 hour.

  2. Cut the turnip, carrots, onions, and celery into long pieces.

  3. Add the vegetables and sweet herbs to the pot.

  4. Stew everything together slowly for several hours.

Finish and serve

  1. Season to taste and stir in the brown sugar.

  2. If desired, serve the broth over toasted bread.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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

Bacon
Releases fat and savory flavor into the water, giving the broth its body and taste.
Turnip
Adds a mildly sweet, earthy flavor that deepens as it slowly simmers.
Carrots
Contribute natural sweetness and body to the broth as they soften during stewing.
Onions
Build savory depth and aroma as they cook slowly into the broth.
Brown sugar
Adds a touch of sweetness that balances the salty, savory bacon flavor.

The step that matters

Stew everything together slowly for several hours. A long, gentle simmer lets the bacon, vegetables and herbs slowly release their flavors into the water. Boiling hard instead can make the broth cloudy and cook the vegetables unevenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, carrot, celery, sugar, bread):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, carrot, celery, sugar, bread. 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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