Name: Cabbage Soup a Provencale
Ingredients: ½ peck of peas; 1 head of cabbage, cut in quarters; ⅓ cup of the best oil; coarse sea salt to taste

Why it works: Peas and cabbage work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 392 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cabbage Soup a Provencale

Ingredients

½ peck of peas
1 head of cabbage, cut in quarters
⅓ cup of the best oil
coarse sea salt to taste

Directions

Boil different sorts of vegetables together, including peas and cabbage tied with a string.
Add the oil and salt to the broth.
Strain the broth and leave it to stew.
Serve garnished with cabbage.

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.

Peas + cabbagetop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together392 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

Peas: Add body and a mild sweetness to the broth as they cook down.
Cabbage: Contributes savory flavor and tender texture as it simmers in the broth.
Oil: Adds fat, which carries flavor and gives the broth a richer mouthfeel.

“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.