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Boiled Salt Pork

Boiled salt pork is a dish of salted pork simmered in water, optionally with vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and cabbage 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 ↓

Boiled Salt Pork

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the salt pork overnight in cold water.

  2. Rinse the pork and place it in a pot with enough cold water to cover it.

Boil

  1. Boil steadily until cooked, removing any scum that rises.

  2. Turn the pork several times while boiling.

  3. Replenish with boiling water as needed to keep the pork covered.

  4. Boil vegetables with the pork if desired.

  5. Save the fat that forms on the surface of the water for cooking purposes.

Serve

  1. Once cooked, drain and serve.

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. Turnip + cabbagetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pork + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  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. Pork + turniptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,358 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

Salt pork
Provides the meat and fat that flavour the dish as it simmers.

The step that matters

Keep the pork fully covered while boiling. Meat exposed above the water cooks unevenly and can dry out or toughen. Adding boiling water keeps the simmer steady so the temperature does not drop and the pork cooks through evenly.

Swap the turnip

The recipe marks turnip as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, cabbage, potato):

  1. Onionfits about as well
  2. Broccolifits about as well
  3. Mustardfits about as well
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, cabbage, potato. 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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