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A Yankee Boiled Dinner

A boiled dinner of cabbage, pork, beet, potatoes, and squash.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 897 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

A Yankee Boiled Dinner

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Put 2½ pints of water in a kettle on the stove.

  2. Wash and cut the cabbage in half, removing the heart.

  3. Place the cabbage halves in the kettle.

  4. Prepare the pork and add it to the kettle with the cabbage.

  5. Wash, peel, and cut the beet lengthwise into four pieces, then add it to the kettle.

  6. If desired, add turnips cut crosswise.

Boil

  1. Boil slowly for 2 hours.

  2. Add potatoes and slices of squash, and season with salt if needed.

  3. Boil until the potatoes are done.

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 + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pork + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

  4. Turnip + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Cabbage + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together275 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

Pork
Adds rich flavor and fat to the broth as it cooks slowly.
Cabbage
Softens into tender leaves while absorbing flavor from the pork broth.
Potatoes
Turn starchy and tender as they boil, thickening the broth slightly.
Beet
Lends a sweet, earthy flavor and color to the broth and vegetables.

The step that matters

Boil slowly for 2 hours. A gentle simmer keeps the pork tender and stops the vegetables from breaking apart, while a hard rolling boil toughens meat and overcooks the cabbage.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits about as well
  3. Broccolifits about as well
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, pork, potato, pepper. 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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