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A Good Boiled Dinner

A boiled dinner of meat, cabbage, turnips, and potatoes cooked in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and turnip 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 ↓

A Good Boiled Dinner

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Wash the meat thoroughly and place it in a pot with enough boiling water to just cover it.

  2. Once it boils, reduce the heat to a simmer.

  3. Cook the meat until almost tender, about 2.5 hours.

Prepare and add the vegetables

  1. Prepare the vegetables: cut cabbage into quarters, halve medium-sized turnips, and leave potatoes whole or cut large ones in half.

  2. Peel the potatoes and turnips, then soak them in cold water for 30 minutes before using.

  3. Skim the surface of the pot before adding the vegetables.

  4. Add the vegetables to the pot and continue to boil for an additional hour or until everything is thoroughly cooked.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cabbage + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together275 recipes

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

  4. Meat + potatotop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together786 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Meat + turniptop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together930 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

Meat
Provides savory flavor and protein that becomes tender during long, gentle simmering.
Potatoes
Break down as they cook, thickening the broth and giving the dish a soft, starchy body.
Cabbage
Softens as it cooks, adding sweetness and mild flavor to the broth.
Turnips
Turn tender while absorbing savory broth, adding a slightly sweet, earthy note.

The step that matters

Keep the meat at a gentle simmer. A hard boil toughens meat proteins and can make the broth cloudy, while a gentle simmer lets connective tissue slowly soften into tender meat.

Swap the cabbage

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, 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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