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A Vegetable Olio

A stew of cabbage, carrots, turnips, potatoes, onions, spinach, butter, and cream, seasoned with salt and pepper.

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

A Vegetable Olio

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Boil the cabbage, carrots, turnips, potatoes, and onions until tender.

  2. Drain and cut the vegetables into pieces.

Stew

  1. Mix with spinach, butter, cream, salt, and pepper.

  2. Cover and stew for 2 hours.

  3. Stir in a bit of butter rolled in flour over a clear fire.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together320 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 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. Carrot + potatotop 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

Cabbage
Forms the bulk of the stew and becomes soft and mellow during long cooking.
Potatoes
Break down slightly during stewing, thickening the liquid and adding body.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the vegetables.
Cream
Adds richness and smoothness, softening the flavour of the stew.
Flour (in the method)
Thickens the stew's liquid when cooked with butter into a roux.

The step that matters

Stirring in the butter and flour. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps; kneading it into butter first lets it disperse evenly and thicken smoothly as it cooks.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, potato, onion, spinach, butter, cream):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, potato, onion, spinach, butter, cream. 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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