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Cabbage, with White Sauce

Boiled cabbage served with a white sauce, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and sauce work together. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 437 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Cabbage, with White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove all dead or faded outer leaves from the cabbage and trim the stalk.

  2. Cut the cabbage across twice at the stalk end; if large, quarter it.

  3. Wash the cabbage well in cold water and drain.

Boil the cabbage

  1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil, adding salt and baking soda.

  2. Add the cabbage to the boiling water and stir it down once or twice.

  3. Boil quickly for 8 minutes.

  4. Prepare another pot of boiling water with the same salt and soda mixture.

  5. Transfer the cabbage to the second pot and boil for 15 minutes.

  6. Discard the water from the first pot, refill it, and return the cabbage to it.

  7. Boil for 10 minutes if small, or 20 minutes if large.

Finish and serve

  1. Drain the cabbage in a colander and press well to remove excess water.

  2. Season with pepper and serve in a hot vegetable dish, cut into squares, topped with 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 + saucetop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together437 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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 softens into a tender, edible vegetable during boiling.
White sauce
Adds richness and moisture, coating the cooked cabbage with a creamy, mild flavour.
Baking soda
Raises the water's alkalinity, helping the cabbage keep a green colour and soften faster.

The step that matters

Press the cabbage well after draining. Water left in the cabbage dilutes the sauce and makes the dish soggy, so removing excess moisture keeps the sauce thick and the texture firm.

“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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