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Vegetable Olio

A creamy stew of cabbage, carrots, turnips, potatoes, and onions cooked in butter and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Olio

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Boil the cabbage, carrots, turnips, potatoes, and onions in three separate pots of salted boiling water until tender.

  2. Drain the vegetables and cut them into pieces.

Stew

  1. Mix all the vegetables together with the butter, cream, and pepper.

  2. Dredge the mixture with flour and stew it covered for two hours.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

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

  5. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 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

Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and giving the vegetables a smooth texture.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, helping the mixture turn silky as it stews.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid, so the stewed vegetables cling together in a body.
Potatoes
Starch that softens into the stew and helps thicken it.

The step that matters

Dredging with flour before stewing. Flour must be evenly coated over the mixture before stewing; if it clumps or is added unevenly, it forms pockets of raw starch and the sauce turns lumpy instead of smooth.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, potato, onion, butter, cream, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, potato, onion, butter, cream, 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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