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Boiled Vegetables

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and carrot 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 ↓

Boiled Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the corned beef in the morning.

  2. One hour before serving, add washed potatoes (with skins), quartered turnips, carrots, and quartered cabbage.

  3. Carefully remove vegetables and place in separate dishes, serving hot.

  4. For beets, wash and boil with an inch of stalk to prevent bleeding.

  5. Boil young beets for 1 hour; older beets may take several hours.

  6. Once tender, skin and slice beets, then season with salt, pepper, butter, and vinegar.

  7. For squash, cut young squashes into pieces and boil with a little salt until tender (30-45 minutes).

  8. Drain and mash squash, adding butter, salt, and pepper, keeping hot until served.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + cabbagetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Potato + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

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

  4. Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

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

Swap the cabbage

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, potato, turnip, carrot, vinegar, butter, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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