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Vegetable Hash

A dish of sliced leftover boiled vegetables seasoned with salt, pepper, flour, and cooked in drippings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 Hash

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Slice the leftover vegetables into pieces.

  2. Chop the cabbage or cut it with a knife.

  3. Dredge the vegetables with salt, pepper, and a little flour.

Cook

  1. In a frying pan, heat the drippings over low heat.

  2. Add the vegetable mixture and cover the pan.

  3. If needed, add a few spoonfuls of the water used to boil the vegetables for moisture.

  4. Avoid using too much carrot to maintain the flavor balance.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + cabbagetop 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

Leftover boiled vegetables
Form the bulk of the hash and provide the main texture and body.
Flour
Light coating on the vegetables that helps them brown and hold together in the pan.
Drippings
Fat that fries the vegetables and adds savory flavor and browning.

The step that matters

Cover the pan over low heat. Low heat with a lid lets the vegetables warm through and soften without scorching the flour coating or drying out. Too much heat browns the outside before the centre is hot.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, parsnip, cabbage, pepper, flour. 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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