Skip to main content
Starter

Hotch Potch

A barley and vegetable stew simmered with cabbage, carrots, onions, turnip, herbs, butter, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Hotch Potch

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a large saucepan, bring 3 quarts of water to a boil.

  2. Add the pearl barley, cabbage, carrots, onions, turnip, parsley, and herbs.

  3. Stir in the butter, pepper, and salt.

  4. Reduce heat and simmer for 2.5 hours, stirring occasionally.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Barley + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together629 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

Pearl barley
Swells as it cooks, thickening the broth and giving the soup body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, rounding out the flavour of the broth.
Carrots
Contribute natural sweetness and colour as they soften in the broth.
Onions
Release sugars and aroma as they cook, building the savoury base.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (barley, cabbage, carrot, turnip, parsley, butter, pepper):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, cabbage, carrot, turnip, parsley, butter, 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.

More hotch potch recipes

Pickle 4 See all 19 →

You might also like

Deviled OystersDeviled Oysters25 recipes