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Pork, Stewed with Vegetables

A stew of pork with cabbage, carrots, turnips, and potatoes simmered in flavored stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pork, Stewed with Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a large iron stewpan, combine the cabbage, carrots, turnips, potatoes, and pork.

  2. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Pour the flavored stock over the ingredients.

Cook and serve

  1. Cover the stewpan tightly and simmer gently for 2.5 to 3 hours until done.

  2. Serve the pork on a hot dish with the vegetables arranged around it.

  3. Pour some gravy over the meat and serve the rest in a tureen.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

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

  4. Potato + porktop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  5. Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 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

Pork
Provides the main meat; slow simmering breaks down its connective tissue for tender results.
Potatoes
Starchy vegetable that softens in the stock and thickens the broth slightly as it cooks.
Savoy cabbage
Becomes tender during the long simmer, adding mild sweetness and body to the stew.
Carrots
Release natural sugars during simmering, adding sweetness and color to the stew.
Turnips
Soften during simmering and add a mildly sweet, earthy flavor to the broth.

The step that matters

Simmer gently with the lid on. A gentle simmer keeps the pork tender rather than tough and stringy, while a tight lid holds moisture so the stew does not reduce too far. Boiling hard toughens meat and breaks up the vegetables.

Swap the cabbage

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, potato, pork, 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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