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Soup

Cabbage Soup

A hearty soup made with bacon or pork, optional veal/mutton/beef, cabbage, carrots, turnips, celery, leeks, and optional mashed potatoes for thickening.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cabbage Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a soup kettle, add the bacon or pork and optional meat.

  2. Simmer the meat for 2 hours, skimming as it comes to a boil.

  3. In a pail of cold water, shred the cabbages and chop the carrots, turnips, celery, and leeks.

Make the soup

  1. When the soup boils, add all the vegetables.

  2. Cook until the vegetables are tender but not falling apart.

  3. If desired, thicken the soup with a few mashed boiled 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.

  1. Turnip + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Sweet bacon or pork
Gives the broth its main meaty flavour and fat as it simmers.
Cabbages
Form the bulk of the soup and become sweet and tender as they cook.
Mashed boiled potatoes
Thicken the broth through their starch when mashed into it.

The step that matters

Cook the vegetables until tender but not falling apart. Vegetables keep cooking in the hot broth after they are removed from heat. Stopping when they are just tender keeps their texture intact instead of breaking down into mush.

Swap the potato

The recipe marks potato as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, veal, cabbage, carrot, turnip, celery, leek):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, veal, cabbage, carrot, turnip, celery, leek. 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.

More cabbage soup recipes

Russian 7Savoy 5Beef 4Potato 3Red 3 See all 111 →

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