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Boiled Kale and Smoked Jowl

A boiled kale dish flavored with smoked jowl and finished with rich white sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Kale and sauce work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 87 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Boiled Kale and Smoked Jowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the roots of the kale and wash the leaves thoroughly.

  2. Soak the kale in salt water for several hours to remove bitterness.

Cook

  1. Boil the smoked jowl in a large saucepan until half cooked.

  2. Add the kale to the saucepan and cook until thoroughly done.

  3. Remove the jowl, drain the water, and chop the kale finely.

Season and serve

  1. Season the kale and mix in a little rich white sauce.

  2. Serve on a platter with slices of the jowl on top.

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. Kale + saucetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together87 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Kale
Forms the main body of the dish and gives its leafy, slightly bitter flavour.
Smoked jowl
Adds smoky, salty flavour and rich fat that seasons the cooking water and the kale.
Rich white sauce
Adds creaminess and moisture, softening the chopped kale and binding it together.

The step that matters

Soaking the kale in salt water. Soaking draws out bitter compounds and dissolves some of the leaf's sharp flavour, so the kale tastes milder. Skipping or shortening the soak leaves the finished dish noticeably bitter.

“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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