Name: Creamed Cabbage
Ingredients: Cabbage; Boiling water; Butter; Pepper; Coarse sea salt; 1 teaspoon sugar; ½ cup sweet cream; Chopped celery (optional)

Why it works: Pepper and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Creamed Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

Cut the cabbage into pieces slightly coarser than for slaw.
Cover the cabbage with boiling water.
For extra flavor, add chopped celery while cooking.

Season and serve

Season with butter, pepper, coarse sea salt, and sugar.
Before serving, add the sweet cream.

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.

Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together16,012 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,081 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Cabbage + celerytop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,840 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,516 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Cabbage: Forms the body of the dish and becomes tender when cooked.
Sweet cream: Adds richness and a smooth, creamy texture to the cooked cabbage.
Butter: Adds fat for richness and a rounded flavor.
Sugar: Adds sweetness that balances the cabbage's natural bitterness.

Swap the celery

The recipe marks celery as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, butter, pepper, sugar, cream):

Nutmegfits about as well
Cinnamonfits about as well
Celerythe original
Tarragonfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, butter, pepper, sugar, cream. 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.