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Boiled Vegetables

A boiled vegetable dish served with corned beef, including potatoes, turnips, carrots, cabbage, beets, and squash, seasoned with salt, pepper, butter, and vinegar.

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

Boil the meat and vegetables

  1. Boil the corned beef in water early in the morning.

  2. Add washed potatoes with skins, quartered turnips, carrots, and cabbage.

  3. Carefully remove vegetables.

  4. Place vegetables in separate dishes, serving hot.

Cook the beets

  1. Wash and boil beets with an inch of stalk to prevent bleeding.

  2. Cook beets for 1 hour if young, longer if older.

  3. Skin and slice beets.

  4. Season beets with salt, pepper, butter, and vinegar.

  5. Serve beets hot or cold.

Cook the squash

  1. Cut young squashes into pieces.

  2. Boil squashes in salted water until tender, about 30 to 45 minutes.

  3. Drain squashes.

  4. Mash squashes with a potato masher.

  5. Add butter, pepper, and salt to squashes.

  6. Keep squashes warm before serving.

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

What each ingredient does

Corned beef
Provides the main salty, savoury meat, which becomes tender through long gentle simmering in water.
Potatoes
Their starch softens when boiled, giving a floury, tender texture that absorbs butter and seasoning.
Cabbage
Boiling softens its leaves and mellows its sharp flavour, leaving a mild, slightly sweet taste.
Turnips
Boiling softens their flesh and brings out a mild sweetness that balances the salty beef.

The step that matters

Wash and boil beets with an inch of stalk. Cutting the roots or stalks lets the red pigment and juices leak out during boiling, so leaving an inch of stalk keeps the colour and flavour inside the beet.

Swap the cabbage

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, potato, turnip, carrot, butter, pepper, vinegar. 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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