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Old Fashioned Boiled Dinner

A boiled dinner of corned beef, salt pork, and assorted root vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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 beef

  1. In the morning, place the corned beef in a large kettle of cold water and simmer slowly.

Add the vegetables

  1. At 10:00 AM, add the salt pork, beets, and carrots.

  2. At 11:00 AM, add the turnips, parsnips, and potatoes.

  3. Season with salt and a pinch of red pepper.

Serve

  1. Serve the vegetables in separate dishes.

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. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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 meat and its savory, salty flavor as it simmers slowly in water.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savory depth to the cooking liquid and the dish.
Beets
Add sweetness and earthy color to the dish.
Potatoes
Add starch that gives body and a soft, hearty texture.

The step that matters

Simmer the corned beef slowly. Gentle simmering keeps the meat tender and prevents the proteins from tightening. A hard boil toughens the meat and can break up the vegetables.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Beetrootfits about as well
  3. Potatothe original
  4. Lettucefits about as well

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