Name: Boiled Dinner
Ingredients: corned beef (50 to 75 grams per serving); cabbage (100 grams per serving); one other vegetable (100 grams per serving); seasoning (horseradish, mint, capers, curry, tarragon vinegar, onion, bay leaf, cloves)

Why it works: Horseradish and capers share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 82 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Dinner

Ingredients

corned beef (50 to 75 grams per serving)
cabbage (100 grams per serving)
one other vegetable (100 grams per serving)
seasoning (horseradish, mint, capers, curry, tarragon vinegar, onion, bay leaf, cloves)

Directions

Boil the corned beef until tender.
Add cabbage and the other vegetable to the pot and cook until they are soft.
Season with horseradish, mint, capers, curry, tarragon vinegar, onion, bay leaf, and cloves to taste.
Serve the corned beef with the 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.

Horseradish + caperstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together82 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Capers + tarragontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together379 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Cabbage + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together481 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Horseradish + tarragontop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together73 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Horseradish + oniontop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,784 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Corned beef: Provides the main protein; boiling until tender breaks down its connective tissue for a soft texture.
Cabbage: Cooks down to a soft, sweet vegetable that absorbs the cooking liquid and flavour.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, cabbage, horseradish, capers, tarragon, vinegar, onion):

Dillfits better
Garlicfits better
Parsleyfits better
Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, cabbage, horseradish, capers, tarragon, vinegar, onion. 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.