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Cocoanut Cabbage

A sautéed cabbage dish flavored with curry, turmeric, coconut, and shrimp.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Cocoanut Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

  1. Parboil the cabbage until tender, then drain and chop it.

Cook the onions

  1. Slice the onions into rings and fry them in fat with a small piece of garlic until golden.

  2. Add the curry powder, turmeric, and salt to the onions, mixing well.

Combine and simmer

  1. Stir in the chopped cabbage, coconut, and shrimp, and cook gently for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Turmeric + coconuttop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,027 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  3. Turmeric + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,363 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Cabbage + turmerictop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together618 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Cabbage
Forms the bulk of the dish and becomes tender through parboiling.
Onions
Frying until golden builds sweetness and savoury depth as the base of the dish.
Coconut
Adds richness and a mild sweetness that softens the curry spices.
Shrimp
Supplies protein and a briny flavour that stands out against the cabbage.
Curry powder
Provides the main spiced aroma, which blooms when fried in fat.

The step that matters

Frying the onions until golden. Onions cooked slowly in fat caramelise and build sweetness; if they are rushed or burnt, the dish turns bitter and the sugars do not develop evenly.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, turmeric, garlic, coconut, shrimp, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, turmeric, garlic, coconut, shrimp, 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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