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Boiled Dinner

A boiled dinner of corned beef with assorted vegetables, served separately and mashed with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Boiled Dinner

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Put the corned beef in a large pot of water and bring to a boil at 9 AM for a noon dinner.

  2. If the beets are old, add them soon after the meat.

  3. Peel the turnips and rutabaga, and cut the rutabaga into thick slices.

  4. Wash the carrots and pare the parsnips thin.

  5. Cut the cabbage into quarters, trimming it and removing the hard stump.

  6. Clean and pare the potatoes and squash, and keep all vegetables in cold water until ready to cook.

Cook the vegetables

  1. Boil the carrots for 2 hours if old, the turnips and cabbage for 1.5 hours, and the potatoes, parsnips, and squash for 30 to 45 minutes.

  2. If using a large kettle, boil all vegetables together except the beets.

  3. If preferred, boil the cabbage separately in some of the meat broth, refilling the meat pot as needed.

Serve

  1. Serve the meat and each vegetable on separate dishes, mashing the squash and turnip with a little butter.

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. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Rutabaga + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together74 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  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 protein and savory flavor that the broth carries into the vegetables.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the mashed squash and turnip.
Potatoes
Soft, starchy texture when boiled until tender.

Swap the cabbage

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

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

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