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Cabbage with Corned Beef

A boiled corned beef served with cabbage, accompanied by ketchup, mustard, or horseradish sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Ketchup and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Cabbage with Corned Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the corned beef in cold water.

  2. Place the washed corned beef in a large kettle and cover the meat with cold water.

  3. While the meat cooks, remove the outer leaves from the cabbage and cut the cabbage into quarters.

  4. Soak the cabbage in cold water for 1 hour.

Cook and serve

  1. Simmer gently for 2 hours or 15 minutes per pound.

  2. Add the soaked cabbage to the kettle with the meat and simmer for an additional hour.

  3. Once done, place the meat in the center of a large dish and arrange the cabbage around the meat.

  4. Serve with tomato ketchup, mustard, or horseradish sauce.

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. Ketchup + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cabbage + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together481 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Cabbage + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,645 recipes

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

  5. Beef + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,448 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

Corned beef
Is the main protein, becoming tender through long, gentle simmering that breaks down its connective tissue.
Cabbage
Absorbs flavour from the simmering liquid and becomes soft and sweet as it cooks.

The step that matters

Simmer gently. A gentle simmer keeps the meat tender; a hard boil toughens the muscle fibres and can make the meat dry and stringy. Keep the liquid just bubbling so the connective tissue softens slowly.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, cabbage, ketchup, mustard, horseradish, sauce):

  1. Turnipfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, cabbage, ketchup, mustard, horseradish, sauce. 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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