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Bacon and Parsnips

A dish of boiled bacon and parsnips seasoned with pepper, thyme, and salt, served optionally with boiled potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 270 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Bacon and Parsnips

Ingredients

Directions

Cook

  1. Boil the bacon in plenty of water for 1.5 hours.

  2. Add the well-cleaned parsnips to the pot.

  3. Season with pepper, thyme, and salt.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled potatoes if desired.

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. Parsnip + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together270 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Thyme + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,586 recipes

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

  4. Parsnip + potatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together353 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fat bacon
Renders fat into the cooking water, adding richness and savoury flavour to the parsnips.
Parsnips
Provide the main vegetable, becoming tender and sweet as they simmer in the broth.

Swap the potato

The recipe marks potato as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsnip, pepper, thyme):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsnip, pepper, thyme. 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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