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Pork, Stewed with Vegetables and Fruit

A pork stew with carrots, turnips, onions, celery, sage, pepper, and fruit garnishes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Pork, Stewed with Vegetables and Fruit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pork

  1. Cut the pork into pieces as for haricot mutton.

  2. Fry the pork pieces until browned.

Make the stew

  1. Add the sliced carrots, turnips, onions, and celery.

  2. Cover with warm water.

  3. Bring to a boil.

  4. Skim off the fat.

  5. Add chopped sage and pepper.

  6. Cook gently for 1 hour.

  7. Stir in brown flour, store sauce, tomato chutney, and salt.

  8. Boil for another 30 minutes or more.

Serve

  1. Serve the pork on a hot dish.

  2. Sprinkle with currants.

  3. Accompany with pickles and green vegetables.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Sage + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Lean pork
Provides the meat that browns first and becomes tender during the long simmer.
Brown flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy as it boils.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook, adding depth to the stew base.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the stew as they cook down.
Turnips
Soften during the simmer, adding earthy flavour and body to the stew.
Tomato chutney
Adds sweetness, acidity and savoury depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Skim off the fat. Fat rises to the surface as the stew comes to a boil. Removing it keeps the liquid clean-tasting and prevents a greasy gravy once the flour is stirred in.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, carrot, turnip, celery, sage, pepper, flour):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, carrot, turnip, celery, sage, pepper, flour. 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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