Name: Kale for Greens, with Salt Pork or Bacon
Ingredients: 1 bunch kale; salt pork or bacon

Why it works: Kale and pork work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 177 recipes. Both carry 2-methylbutyraldehyde, which smells malty, chocolate. The science ↓

Kale for Greens, with Salt Pork or Bacon

Ingredients

1 bunch kale
salt pork or bacon

Directions

Wash the kale and chop it coarsely.
Cook the kale with the salt pork or bacon until tender.
Alternatively, cook the kale separately and serve it alongside the meats.

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.

Kale + porktop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together177 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Kale: Forms the body of the dish and becomes tender as it simmers with the pork.
Salt pork or bacon: Adds fat and savory flavor that seasons the greens as they cook.

“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.