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Boiled Cabbage

Boiled cabbage is a simple dish of cabbage cooked in salted water and served hot with melted butter or sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,397 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Boiled Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the outside leaves from the cabbage.

  2. Quarter the cabbage and cut out the heart of the cabbage.

  3. Wash the cabbage thoroughly.

Cook

  1. Blanch the cabbage in boiling water.

  2. Immerse the cabbage in cold water.

  3. Cook the cabbage in boiling salted water without covering the saucepan.

  4. Drain the cabbage.

Serve

  1. Serve the cabbage very hot with melted butter or any desired sauce.

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. Cabbage + buttertop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,397 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cabbage
Forms the main body of the dish, softening into tender leaves as it cooks.

The step that matters

Cook without covering the saucepan. Leaving the lid off lets volatile sulfur compounds escape with steam, which keeps the cabbage tasting milder and its color brighter.

“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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