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White Cabbage Curry

A curry made with shredded white cabbage, sour apple, onions, butter, spices, lemon juice, and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

White Cabbage Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Make the onions

  1. In a pan, melt the butter and fry the sliced onions until soft.

Cook the curry

  1. Add the shredded cabbage, chopped apple, and fried onions to a stew pan.

  2. Season with cayenne, black pepper, salt, curry powder, and turmeric.

  3. Moisten with lemon juice and strong gravy.

  4. Cover and simmer gently, stirring occasionally until tender.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Turmeric + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,192 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Pepper + turmerictop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  5. Cabbage + turmerictop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together618 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 soft during slow simmering.
Sour apple
Adds acidity and a fruity sweetness that balances the spices.
Onions
Add sweetness and body as they soften in butter.
Butter
Carries the onions' flavour and adds richness to the dish.
Curry powder
Provides the main warm, aromatic spice character of the curry.
Strong gravy
Adds savoury depth and moisture for the cabbage to simmer in.

The step that matters

Simmer gently until tender. Cover the pan and keep the heat low, stirring now and then. A hard boil or dry pan can scorch the spices and butter, and cabbage cooked too fast stays tough or catches on the base.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, onion, butter, pepper, turmeric, lemon):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Mangofits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, onion, butter, pepper, turmeric, lemon. 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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