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Soup

Cabbage Soup

A hearty soup made with beef, veal, salt pork, mutton, cabbage, onions, and butter, served with optional sorrel and bread crumb.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Cabbage Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Prepare a good broth using the meats: beef, veal, salt pork, and mutton.

  2. Boil the broth until it is galloping.

Cook the soup

  1. Add the shredded and chopped vegetables to the boiling broth.

  2. Cook the vegetables without a lid until tender but not mushy.

  3. Slice and chop the onions and fry them in butter until rich brown.

  4. Add the fried onions to the soup and mix well.

  5. For a meager version, use water instead of broth and add chopped sorrel and grated crumb of 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. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Cabbage + sorreltop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  4. Cabbage + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,001 recipes

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

  5. Onion + sorreltop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together459 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

Cabbage
Forms the bulk of the soup and becomes tender and sweet as it cooks.
Onions
Fried until rich brown, they add deep, sweet flavour and colour to the broth.
Lean beef
Releases flavour and body into the broth as it simmers.
Veal knuckle
Adds gelatin and body to the broth, giving it a fuller texture.
Butter
Fat that browns the onions, adding richness and aroma.

The step that matters

Fry the onions until rich brown. Browning develops sweet, deeply savoury flavours through the Maillard reaction. Pale onions give a flat taste, while burnt ones turn bitter, so watch them closely as they colour.

Swap the sorrel

The recipe marks sorrel as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, veal, pork, mutton, cabbage, onion, butter):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Pepperfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Sorrelthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, veal, pork, mutton, cabbage, onion, 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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