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Soup

White Cabbage Soup

A soup made with shredded white cabbage, butter, egg, cider, and corn starch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and corn work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 234 recipes. Both carry 2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

White Cabbage Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Cook the finely shredded cabbage in water until well done.

  2. Dissolve the corn starch in cold water and add it to the cabbage.

  3. Stir in the salt, butter, and beaten egg.

  4. Pour in the cider and heat through.

Serve

  1. Serve with snowflake crackers or breadsticks.

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 + corntop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together234 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Cabbage + cidertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together306 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexan-1-ol (green, grassy).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + cidertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

White cabbage
Forms the main body of the soup and becomes tender when cooked well done.
Corn starch
Thickens the cooking liquid so the soup has body.
Egg
Beaten in at the end to enrich the soup and add richness and some thickening.
Butter
Adds fat for richer flavour and a smoother mouthfeel.
Cider
Adds acidity and fruity flavour that brightens the soup.

The step that matters

Adding the egg. Beaten egg stirred into hot liquid can scramble into small curds instead of blending smoothly. Stirring it in gently, off the boil and into a slightly cooled base, helps keep the soup silky.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (corn, butter, egg, cider):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, butter, egg, cider. 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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