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New Ham, Boiled

A boiled ham served with boiled cabbage and turnips.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

New Ham, Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the ham

  1. Place the new ham in a pot and cover with water.

  2. Boil the ham for 1 hour.

  3. Remove the boiling liquid and add cold water to the pot.

  4. Boil the ham again briskly.

Cook the vegetables and serve

  1. In a separate pot, boil the cabbage and turnips until tender.

  2. Serve the ham with the cabbage and turnips on the side.

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. Ham + cabbagetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together186 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Ham + turniptop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together692 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

Ham
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender and flavorful as it simmers in water.
Cabbage
Becomes soft and sweet when boiled until tender, adding bulk to the meal.
Turnips
Becomes soft and mildly sweet when boiled until tender, adding bulk to the meal.

The step that matters

Changing the cooking liquid before the second boil. Removing the first boiling liquid and adding cold water to the pot lets the ham be cooked again in fresh liquid. Discarding the first water helps reduce its strong salty and smoky flavor in the finished dish.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, cabbage):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Turnipthe original
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Cauliflowerfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, cabbage. 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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