Name: Boiled Cabbage
Ingredients: 1 small piece of bacon or ham; 1 cabbage

Why it works: Ham and cabbage 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 ↓

Boiled Cabbage

Ingredients

1 small piece of bacon or ham
1 cabbage

Directions

Prepare

Trim the cabbage, removing any poor leaves and checking for insects.
Cut the cabbage into quarters.

Cook and serve

Place the bacon or ham in a kettle with the cabbage.
Boil for about 1 hour until the cabbage is tender.
Carefully remove the cabbage and serve hot.

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.

Ham + cabbagetop 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

Cabbage: Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender as it simmers.
Bacon or ham: Adds savory, smoky flavor to the cooking water and the cabbage.

“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.