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Savoury Cabbage

A stuffed cabbage dish with veal, ham, shallots, suet, spices, and egg yolks, boiled slowly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Savoury Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. In a marble mortar, pound the veal, ham, shallots, and beef suet until well combined.

  2. Season the mixture with white pepper, cayenne pepper, nutmeg, lemon peel, coarse sea salt, parsley, and lemon thyme.

  3. Beat in the egg yolks until thoroughly mixed.

Stuff and cook

  1. Wash and clean the cabbage, removing the heart.

  2. Stuff the cabbage with the meat mixture and roll it in a cloth, sewing it tightly.

  3. Boil the stuffed cabbage slowly for 3 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with a white sauce.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Shallot + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  4. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Provides the main meaty body and bulk of the filling.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the filling moist and tender as it cooks.
Egg yolks
Bind the minced meat so the filling holds together when rolled and cooked.
Cabbage
Wraps the filling and turns tender during slow boiling.
Ham
Adds salty, savory flavor to the meat filling.

The step that matters

Boil the stuffed cabbage slowly for 3 hours. Gentle, sustained simmering cooks the meat through and softens the cabbage without breaking the rolls apart. A hard rolling boil can loosen the cloth and make the filling tough and dry.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, ham, shallot, beef, pepper, nutmeg, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, ham, shallot, beef, pepper, nutmeg, lemon. 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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