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Pork-stew

A hearty stew of pork, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, onions, and cornmeal dumplings, seasoned with salt and red pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and turnip 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 ↓

Pork-stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pork

  1. Fill a dinner pot half-full with bony pieces of pork and cover with cold water.

  2. Bring the pot to a boil and simmer for three hours, adding 1 tablespoon of coarse sea salt and a small piece of red pepper.

  3. Remove any fat from the stew while boiling.

Prepare the vegetables and dumplings

  1. Peel and cut the potatoes into small pieces.

  2. Boil the potatoes for 30 minutes or longer if using red potatoes.

  3. For dumplings, scald 1 pint of cornmeal in boiling water until just wet, then add ¼ teaspoon of coarse sea salt.

  4. Wet your hands and roll the cornmeal dough into small balls.

  5. Boil the dumplings for 20 to 30 minutes.

Build the stew

  1. Slice 2 pounds of salt pork and cook in 1 quart of hot water for 2 hours.

  2. Add 1 cup of sliced carrots, 2 cups of sliced parsnips, and 3 cups of sliced turnips to the stew.

  3. Half an hour before serving, add 4 cups of sliced potatoes and 1 cup of onions if desired.

  4. Season with 1 teaspoon of salt if needed.

  5. Thicken with 1 tablespoon of rye meal mixed with cold water just 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. Parsnip + turniptop 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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pork
Gives the stew its meaty flavour and rich body as it simmers.
Salt pork
Adds savoury fat and flavour that gently enriches the broth.
Potatoes
Soften as they cook, adding starch that helps body the stew.
Cornmeal
Forms the dumplings, giving them a soft, tender crumb when boiled.
Rye meal
Thickens the broth as its starch swells with heat.

The step that matters

Thicken with rye meal mixed in cold water. Starch granules swell and thicken only when heated, and dry rye meal dropped straight in clumps. Mixing it with cold water first makes a smooth slurry that blends evenly into the hot stew.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, pepper, potato, carrot, parsnip, turnip, rye):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, pepper, potato, carrot, parsnip, turnip, rye. 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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