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Vegetable Stew

A hearty stew of cabbage, turnips, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, and salt pork simmered in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and parsnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 590 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Build the layers

  1. Place the cabbage in the bottom of a stew pan.

  2. Layer the salt pork on top of the cabbage.

  3. Add the turnips, carrots, and parsnips, sprinkling each layer with salt, pepper, and flour.

Simmer

  1. Pour in the boiling water and cover the stew pan.

  2. Simmer for 2 hours.

  3. Add the potatoes and simmer for an additional 30 minutes.

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. Turnip + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

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

  3. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Potato + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cabbage
Forms the bulk of the stew and softens into tender strands as it simmers.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savory flavor that seasons the broth and vegetables as it cooks.
Carrots
Contribute natural sweetness and color to the stew.
Parsnips
Add natural sweetness and a dense, tender texture.
Potatoes
Release starch into the liquid, helping thicken the stew and giving body to the broth.

The step that matters

Adding the potatoes late. Potatoes are starchy and break down with long cooking. Adding them for only the final 30 minutes keeps them intact while the earlier vegetables become tender.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

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