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Corned Beef and Cabbage

A boiled corned beef served with cooked cabbage, optionally accompanied by tomato or horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 481 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Corned Beef and Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beef

  1. Wash the corned beef in cold water.

  2. Place the beef in a large kettle and cover it with cold water.

  3. Simmer gently for 2 hours.

Add the cabbage

  1. While the beef simmers, remove the outer leaves from the cabbage, cut it into quarters, and soak in cold water for 1 hour.

  2. After 2 hours, add the cabbage to the kettle and simmer for an additional 1.5 hours.

Serve

  1. Once done, place the beef in the center of a large dish with the cabbage arranged around it.

  2. Serve with tomato or horseradish if desired.

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 + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together481 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beef + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,448 recipes

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

  3. Cabbage + tomatotop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together333 recipes

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

  4. Tomato + horseradishtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together415 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Beef + horseradishtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together491 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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 meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Hard white cabbage
Becomes tender and sweet as it cooks in the simmering liquid.

The step that matters

Simmer gently. Gentle simmering keeps the meat tender; a hard boil toughens muscle fibres and can make the beef dry and stringy.

Swap the tomato

The recipe marks tomato as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, cabbage, horseradish):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, cabbage, horseradish. 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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