Skip to main content
Main

Old-fashioned Boiled Dinner

A boiled dinner of corned beef with salt pork, beets, carrots, turnips, parsnips, cabbage, potatoes, red pepper, and horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Old-fashioned Boiled Dinner

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the meat and vegetables

  1. Place the corned beef in a large kettle of cold water.

  2. At 10 o'clock, add the salt pork and beets.

  3. Wash the large carrots.

  4. Add the large carrots.

  5. Add the small carrots with the potatoes.

  6. At 11 o'clock, add peeled turnips, parsnips, and quartered cabbage.

  7. Add good-sized peeled potatoes.

  8. Boil for 30 minutes.

  9. Add a piece of red pepper to enhance flavor.

Prepare and serve

  1. Once cooked, place the beets in cold water to remove the skin.

  2. Cut the beets into 3 or 4 pieces.

  3. Drain the cabbage and serve it in a vegetable dish.

  4. Serve the meat and vegetables in separate dishes for convenience.

  5. Serve with grated horseradish or 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. 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. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  5. Turnip + cabbagetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Corned beef
Provides the main savory, salty meat flavor that the whole boiled dinner is built around.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savory richness to the cooking liquid and vegetables.
Beets
Contribute natural sweetness and a deep color to the dish.
Potatoes
Absorb the seasoned cooking liquid, becoming soft and filling.
Cabbage
Turns tender while absorbing savory flavor from the boiling broth.

Swap the cabbage

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

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

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

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipes