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Spanish Olla Podrida

A hearty Spanish stew of beef, mutton, pork, bacon, vegetables, and spices simmered together.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Spanish Olla Podrida

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a stew pan, combine beef, mutton, pork, bacon, and enough water to cover.

  2. Simmer slowly until the meats are half cooked.

  3. Add cabbage, pumpkin, kidney beans, potatoes, and sausages, then boil together for 1 hour.

  4. Season with salt, pepper, cayenne, garlic, cloves, and allspice.

  5. Add tomato and onion, then boil for another 30 minutes.

  6. Serve hot.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Peas + pumpkintop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together89 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Beef + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  5. Peas + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,016 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides rich meat flavor and chewy texture as it simmers slowly.
Mutton
Adds deep, savory meat flavor and body to the broth.
Bacon
Releases fat and smoky, salty flavor into the stew.
Kidney beans
Hold their shape and add starchy body to the stew.
Potatoes
Soften and thicken the broth slightly as they cook.
Cabbage
Adds mild sweetness and tender texture after long boiling.

The step that matters

Simmer the meats slowly until half cooked. Gentle heat keeps meat tender and juicy rather than tough. Boiling hard toughens muscle fibers and makes the broth cloudy, so the meats should stay at a bare simmer before the vegetables go in.

Swap the kidney beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, mutton, pork, peas, cabbage, pumpkin, potato):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Lima beansfits better
  3. Peanutfits better
  4. Kidney beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, mutton, pork, peas, cabbage, pumpkin, 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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