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Stewed Parsnips

A stew of sliced parsnips cooked with salt pork in water and thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 669 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Stewed Parsnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pork

  1. Cut the salt pork into thin slices and cover with cold water.

  2. Boil for three hours.

Finish the stew

  1. Half an hour before serving, add the parsnips and cook until tender.

  2. Ensure there are 3 pints of liquid; add water if necessary.

  3. Thicken the mixture with flour mixed in a little cold milk.

  4. Season with pepper and a little salt if needed.

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. Parsnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together669 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Parsnip + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

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

  3. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

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

  4. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pork + parsniptop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together306 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

Parsnips
Form the body of the stew and add natural sweetness as they soften.
Salt pork
Adds savory fat and salty flavor to the cooking liquid over the long boil.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid so the stew becomes creamy rather than thin.

The step that matters

Thicken with flour mixed in cold milk. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps; mixing it into cold milk first disperses the starch so it thickens smoothly.

Swap the parsnip

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Parsnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, flour, 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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