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Boiled Dinner

A boiled corned beef served with cabbage, carrots, turnips, potatoes, and beets cooked separately.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Dinner

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beef

  1. Wash the corned beef.

  2. Place the corned beef in a large pot with 1 gallon of water.

  3. Bring the water to a boil.

  4. Pour off the water and add fresh water.

  5. Boil the beef slowly for 3.5 hours.

Add the vegetables

  1. In the last 30 minutes, add the quartered cabbage.

  2. 15 minutes later, add the quartered carrots and sliced turnips.

  3. 30 minutes before the end, add the medium-sized potatoes.

  4. Cook the beets in a separate kettle.

Serve

  1. Serve the meat on a large platter with the vegetables arranged around it, or serve the vegetables in separate dishes.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Corn + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together938 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Corn + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together794 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Corned beef
Long, slow simmering breaks down connective tissue, making the meat tender and easy to slice.
Cabbage
Softens as it cooks, becoming mild and sweet while absorbing the cooking liquid.
Potatoes
Starch softens into a tender, fluffy texture as they simmer in the broth.
Carrots
Cooking brings out their natural sweetness, balancing the salty, savory beef.
Turnips
Mellow and soften when simmered, adding a mildly sweet, peppery note to the broth.

The step that matters

Boil the beef slowly. A hard, rolling boil toughens meat fibers and can leave the beef dry and stringy. A gentle simmer lets connective tissue melt slowly into tender, juicy meat.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (corn, beef, carrot, turnip, potato):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, beef, carrot, turnip, 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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