Name: Boiled Dinner
Ingredients: 1 piece of corned beef; ½ cup salt pork (optional); beets; cabbage; turnips; parsnips; potatoes

Why it works: Turnip and parsnip 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 ↓

Boiled Dinner

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the piece of corned beef according to general directions.
If desired, add ½ cup of salt pork.
Add beets, cabbage, turnips, parsnips, and potatoes in that order, allowing each to cook for the recommended time.
Skim the fat off the top of the water before adding the vegetables.
In winter, add the beets with the beef; in summer, they will cook in 2 hours.
If desired, cook squash in a steamer over the other vegetables.

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.

Turnip + parsniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together590 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,690 recipes

Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).
Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together897 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Pork + potatotop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,668 recipes

Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).
Cabbage + parsniptop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together222 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, pork, turnip, parsnip, potato):

Leekfits better
Carrotfits better
Beetrootfits better
Cabbagethe original

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