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Dinners for the Artisan

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Cabbage and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 481 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Dinners for the Artisan

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Purchase a piece of roasting beef without much bone.

  2. Boil the potatoes and cabbage until tender.

  3. Prepare a sauce with horseradish for garnishing.

  4. Serve the beef with boiled potatoes, cabbage, and bread.

  5. Make a suet pudding by mixing suet, currants, mixed spice, sugar, and orange peel.

  6. Steam or boil the pudding until cooked through.

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. Cabbage + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together481 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Potato + horseradishtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Beef + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  4. Potato + cabbagetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together275 recipes

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

  5. Potato + orangetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together537 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, potato, cabbage, horseradish, bread, sugar, orange):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, potato, cabbage, horseradish, bread, sugar, orange. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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