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Cabbage-soup

A soup made from cabbage, ham, broth, and bread, seasoned with a pinch of powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and ham work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 186 recipes. Both carry 2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cabbage-soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

  1. Clean and quarter the colewort.

  2. Plunge it into boiling salted water, then drain and refresh.

  3. Remove the hard parts and press to extract moisture.

Make the soup

  1. In a stewpan, combine the colewort and ham, then moisten with broth.

  2. Boil for 2.5 hours.

Serve

  1. At serving time, slice the rolls and dry them in the oven.

  2. Place the dried bread in a tureen, sprinkle with powder, and pour the soup over it after removing the ham.

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 + hamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together186 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Colewort (cabbage)
Forms the main body and bulk of the soup, softening into tender strands during the long simmer.
Raw blanched ham
Adds savoury, salty flavour to the broth as it cooks with the cabbage.
Broth
Provides the liquid base that carries flavour and keeps the cabbage moist while it simmers.
Rolls
Dried in the oven so they soak up the soup and hold their shape in the tureen.

The step that matters

Pressing the cabbage to extract moisture. Cabbage holds a lot of water; squeezing it out before cooking keeps the soup from being diluted and helps the cabbage take on the broth's flavour.

“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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