Skip to main content
Main

Winter Soup

A warm soup of shredded cabbage, onion, leek, and sago or rice, simmered with milk and served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cabbage and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 214 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Winter Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Wash and trim the cabbage, then cut the leaves into very fine shreds.

  2. Put the cabbage into salted boiling water and cook for 10 minutes.

  3. Drain the cabbage.

Make the soup

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the onion and leek (peeled, cleaned, and sliced) and cook for a few minutes.

  3. Add the cabbage and stir over the heat for a few more minutes.

  4. Moisten with 1 quart of water and bring to a boil, then skim.

  5. Simmer gently until all vegetables are tender.

  6. Season with salt and pepper.

  7. Add the boiling milk and stir in the sago or rice.

  8. Cook for another 20 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with small pieces of toasted 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. Cabbage + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together214 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Onion + leektop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,326 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

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

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

  4. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter or dripping
Adds fat and rich flavour to the vegetables cooked at the start.
Milk
Adds creaminess and a mild sweetness to the finished soup.
Sago or rice
Thickens the soup as it cooks, giving it body.
White cabbage
Forms the main body of the soup, becoming tender as it simmers.

The step that matters

Adding the boiling milk. Pouring in boiling milk can cause it to scorch or curdle on the bottom of the pan; keep the soup at a gentle simmer and stir while adding it.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, leek, butter, milk, rice, pepper, bread):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, leek, butter, milk, rice, pepper, bread. 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.

More cabbage soup recipes

Russian 7Savoy 5Beef 4Potato 3Red 3 See all 111 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesRed CabbageRed Cabbage65 recipes