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To Boil Pork, Bacon, or Salt Beef, with Greens

A boiled pork, bacon, or salt beef dish cooked with greens.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pork and beef match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

To Boil Pork, Bacon, or Salt Beef, with Greens

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pot

  1. Fit a perforated pan inside a saucepan and half-fill it with water.

  2. Add 2 teaspoons of salt and bring the water to a boil.

Cook the greens

  1. Add the greens and boil until tender.

  2. Lift out the perforated pan by the handles and press lightly to remove excess water.

Cook the meat and serve

  1. For the meat, when it is half done, add the greens using only half the amount of salt.

  2. Dish up the meat and press out the broth to save for soup.

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. Pork + beeftop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

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

What each ingredient does

Greens
Boiling softens the leafy fibres so the greens become tender to eat.
Pork
Simmering in salted water cooks the meat gently, keeping it moist and tender.
Salt beef
Simmering in water cooks the cured meat gently, keeping it moist and tender.

The step that matters

Adding the greens to the meat with half the salt. Salt in the cooking water seasons food as it cooks, so using half the salt once the greens go into the meat pot keeps the final dish from becoming too salty.

“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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