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Corned Beef and Cabbage

A boiled corned beef and cabbage dish cooked slowly in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and cabbage work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 872 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Corned Beef and Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and simmer the beef

  1. Wash the corned beef in cold water.

  2. If the beef is too salty, soak it in cold water for 1 hour.

  3. Place the beef in a pot and cover with cold water.

  4. Bring to a boil, skimming off any foam.

  5. Reduce heat and simmer slowly for 3 hours.

Prepare and add the cabbage

  1. Trim the outer leaves from the cabbages, cut off the stalk, and quarter if large.

  2. Soak the cabbages in cold water for 30 minutes, shaking them to clean, then drain them in a colander.

  3. Once the beef is skimmed, add the cabbages to the pot and cook slowly for 2.5 hours.

  4. If the water level gets low, replenish with boiling water, but keep the pot mostly dry at the end.

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 + cabbagetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together872 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + cabbagetop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + beeftop 37% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar cured corned beef
Becomes tender as long, gentle simmering breaks down its connective tissue.
Dutch flat head cabbages
Turns tender and sweeter as it cooks slowly in the pot.

The step that matters

Keep the pot at a gentle simmer. A hard rolling boil toughens the meat's proteins and can break the cabbage apart. A slow simmer lets the connective tissue in the beef soften gradually into gelatin, giving tender, moist meat.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, beef):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, beef. 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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