Name: Cabbage Soup
Ingredients: 2-3 spring cabbages; salt; 3 pints savory stock; pepper

Why it works: Cabbage and pepper 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 ↓

Cabbage Soup

Ingredients

2-3 spring cabbages
salt
3 pints savory stock
pepper

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

Remove the white hearts from the cabbages and wash them.
Boil the cabbages in salted water for 5 minutes.
Drain the cabbages.
Rinse the cabbages under running water.
Cut them into fine shreds.

Make the soup

Bring the savory stock to a boil and add the shredded cabbage.
Season with pepper and salt to taste.
Serve when the cabbage is soft.

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.

Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Spring cabbages: Provide the main body and tender texture of the soup once softened.
Savory stock: Supplies the liquid base and most of the soup's savoury flavour.

“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.