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And Cabbage

A dish of sliced boiled salted beef sautéed with butter, served with boiled cabbage seasoned with pepper and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and cabbage 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 ↓

And Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Select the least cooked parts of the beef.

  2. Sprinkle the beef with pepper and lightly brown it in a frying pan with butter.

Cook the cabbage

  1. Boil the cabbage until tender, then squeeze it dry and chop it small.

  2. Remove the beef from the frying pan and add the chopped cabbage.

  3. Sprinkle the cabbage with pepper and coarse sea salt, and keep the pan moving over the heat for a few minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the cabbage in the center of a dish with the beef arranged around it.

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 + cabbagetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

  2. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  3. Beef + cabbagetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together872 recipes

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

  4. Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Slices of cold boiled salted beef
Provides the main meat and savory flavor, and is browned in butter for color.
Butter
Adds fat for browning the beef and carries flavor into the pan.
Cabbage
Forms the bulk of the dish, with moisture that is driven off as it is stirred over heat.

The step that matters

Squeeze the cabbage dry before frying. Boiled cabbage holds a lot of water. Squeezing it dry keeps it from steaming in the pan, so it can take on color and flavor from the heat instead of becoming soggy.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pepper, butter):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Onionfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, butter. 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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