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Old-fashioned Boiled Dinner

A boiled dinner of corned beef, salt pork, and root vegetables served with horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and parsnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 590 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Old-fashioned Boiled Dinner

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the meat and vegetables

  1. Place the corned beef in a large kettle of cold water at 9:00 AM.

  2. At 10:00 AM, add the salt pork and small beets.

  3. At 11:00 AM, add the peeled and quartered turnips and scraped parsnips.

  4. At 11:30 AM, add the peeled potatoes and quartered cabbage.

  5. Boil for 30 minutes.

Serve

  1. Dish the meat onto a platter and serve most vegetables in separate dishes, using carrots and parsnips for garnishing.

  2. Serve horseradish with the meat.

  3. Be careful not to break the skin of the beets while cooking; peel and quarter them to 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 + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together48 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Cabbage + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together481 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 meat, whose salty curing flavour seasons the whole pot.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savoury flavour to the cooking water and vegetables.
Potatoes
Absorb the seasoned broth and add starch, making a filling side.
Cabbage
Adds mild sweetness and soft texture as it cooks in the seasoned liquid.

The step that matters

Be careful not to break the skin of the beets while cooking. Beets bleed their red pigment when the skin is broken, so the colour leaches into the water and the beets lose flavour and appearance.

Swap the horseradish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pork, turnip, parsnip, potato, cabbage, pepper):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

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

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