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Cabbage, Bismarck Style

Braised cabbage with butter, onions, parsley, broth, and sausages, served on toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Cabbage, Bismarck Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

  1. Trim, wash and quarter the cabbage.

  2. Cut off the thickest part of the stalk.

  3. Parboil the cabbage quarters for 10 minutes.

  4. Immerse the quarters in cold water.

  5. Squeeze out the water from each quarter.

  6. Tie each quarter with string to maintain shape.

Braise

  1. Place the cabbage in a saucepan.

  2. Season the cabbage with salt and pepper.

  3. Add butter, onions, and parsley to the saucepan.

  4. Garnish the cabbage with bay leaves, thyme, and a few grains of pepper.

  5. Moisten the cabbage with broth to cover.

  6. Cook slowly until the cabbage is nearly done.

  7. Add the sausages.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Remove the cabbage from the saucepan.

  2. Place the cabbage on toast.

  3. Surround the cabbage with onions and sausages.

  4. Strain the gravy into another saucepan.

  5. Remove grease from the gravy.

  6. Reduce the gravy.

  7. Thicken the gravy lightly.

  8. Pour the gravy over the 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.

  1. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  5. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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 becomes tender and sweet during slow cooking.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the cooking liquid and the finished gravy.
Broth
Moistens the cabbage during slow cooking and forms the base of the gravy.
Sausages
Add savory meat flavor and fat that enrich the braising liquid and gravy.
Onions
Add sweetness and aroma as they soften during the slow braise.

The step that matters

Cook slowly until the cabbage is nearly done. Gentle heat keeps the cabbage tender without breaking it down into mush or turning it bitter, and keeps the quarters holding their shape.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, butter, onion, parsley, thyme):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, onion, parsley, thyme. 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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