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To Boil Green Vegetables

A simple boiled dish of cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, nettles, and bread, seasoned with salt and brown sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and cauliflower match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 305 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

To Boil Green Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Strip off the dead outside leaves and wash the vegetables well with cold water and coarse sea salt.

  2. Soak cauliflowers and cabbages in the salt water for 20 minutes to remove insects, then cut the big stalk across.

Boil

  1. Bring a saucepan of water to a boil and add 1 tablespoon of coarse sea salt and 1 tablespoon of brown sugar.

  2. Add the green vegetables to the boiling water without a lid to maintain their color.

  3. Boil cauliflowers with the flower side down until the big stalk is tender, about 20-40 minutes.

  4. Boil Brussels sprouts for 15-20 minutes until tender.

  5. Boil a small piece of bread with the greens to reduce any unpleasant smell from the water.

Serve

  1. Strain the vegetables in a colander and press out excess water with a plate.

  2. Serve the vegetables on a hot dish.

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 + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Cauliflower + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together223 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Cabbage + breadtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together380 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Cauliflower + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together497 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Cabbage + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,037 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

Cabbages
Form the bulk of the dish and hold their shape and texture when boiled until tender.
Cauliflowers
Provide the main body of the dish, becoming tender through prolonged boiling.
Brussels sprouts
Add tender, mildly sweet body that softens through boiling.
Brown sugar
Adds a subtle sweetness to the boiling water, mellowing the flavour of the greens.

The step that matters

Boil without a lid. Leaving the lid off lets volatile acids escape, which helps the greens keep a bright green colour. Keeping the water at a full boil also preserves colour and keeps cooking even.

Swap the brussels sprouts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, cauliflower, sugar, bread):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Broccolifits better
  4. Brussels sproutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, cauliflower, sugar, 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.

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