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Winter Soup

A warm soup of shredded cabbage, onion, leek, and sago or rice, simmered with butter, milk, and toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 214 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Winter Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Wash and trim the cabbage, then cut the leaves into very fine shreds.

  2. Put the cabbage into salted boiling water and cook for about 10 minutes; then drain.

  3. Melt the butter or dripping in a saucepan, add the sliced onion and leek, and cook for a few minutes.

  4. Add the drained cabbage and stir over the heat for a few minutes.

Make the soup

  1. Moisten with 1 pint of water, bring to a boil, skim, and simmer gently until all the vegetables are tender.

  2. Season with salt and pepper, add the boiling milk, and stir in the sago or rice.

  3. Cook for another 20 minutes or until the sago or rice is tender.

Serve

  1. Serve with small pieces of toasted bread.

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 + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together214 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Onion + leektop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,326 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  3. Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

White cabbage
Forms the bulk of the soup and becomes tender and sweet as it simmers.
Butter or dripping
Carries the flavour of the aromatics and adds richness to the soup.
Milk
Adds creaminess and mild sweetness to the finished soup.
Sago or rice
Thickens the soup as its starch swells during cooking.

The step that matters

Adding the boiling milk. Adding the milk boiling-hot to the simmering soup keeps the temperature steady, so the soup does not stall or curdle from a sudden drop in heat.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, leek, butter, milk, rice, pepper, bread):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, leek, butter, milk, rice, pepper, 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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