Skip to main content
Main

A Good Boiled Dinner

A boiled dinner of meat, cabbage, turnips, and potatoes seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cabbage and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 897 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

A Good Boiled Dinner

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the meat

  1. Put the meat in a kettle of boiling water, enough to cover it slightly.

  2. When it boils, skim carefully and let it boil slowly.

Add the vegetables

  1. One hour before serving, add the cabbage and turnips.

  2. Half an hour later, add the whole potatoes.

  3. If using corned beef, no salt is needed; otherwise, season with salt and pepper when adding vegetables.

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 + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Turnip + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Cabbage + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together275 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Meat
Gives rich flavor, and its connective tissue softens into tenderness during slow simmering.
Cabbage
Becomes soft and mildly sweet as it cooks in the broth.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and hold their shape through long simmering.
Potatoes
Their starch softens into a tender texture and slightly thickens the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Skim carefully and keep the boil slow. Skimming removes the foam that forms as the meat boils, keeping the broth clear. A gentle simmer lets the meat become tender, while a hard boil toughens its proteins and makes the broth cloudy.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, cabbage, turnip, pepper):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, cabbage, turnip, pepper. 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.

More boiled dinner recipes

Corned Beef 19New England 11 See all 21 →

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesRed CabbageRed Cabbage65 recipesStewed CabbageStewed Cabbage58 recipes