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Cocoanut Cabbage

A stir‑fried cabbage dish with shrimp, coconut, curry, and turmeric.

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

  1. Parboil the cabbage until tender.

  2. Drain and chop the cabbage.

  3. Slice the onions into rings.

Cook

  1. Fry the sliced onions in fat with the garlic until golden.

  2. Add the curry powder, turmeric, and salt, and mix well.

  3. Stir in the chopped cabbage, coconut, and shrimp.

  4. 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. Clove + turmerictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,876 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Garlic + turmerictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,363 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 turns tender through parboiling and gentle cooking.
Onions
Browning in the fat builds sweetness and a savoury base for the spices.
Coconut
Adds richness, fat and a mild sweetness to the sauce.
Shrimp
Provides protein and a seafood flavour that cooks through in the final simmer.
Curry powder
Supplies the main spiced aroma of the dish.

The step that matters

Frying the onions until golden. Onions held in fat must brown gradually; if they burn, they turn bitter and taint the whole dish, while pale onions give little sweetness or depth to the base.

Swap the cabbage

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, clove, garlic, turmeric, 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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