Skip to main content
Main

Ragout of Turnips

A ragout of turnips cooked with butter, sugar, and seasoned gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Ragout of Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Peel enough small turnips to fill a dish.

  2. In a stew pan, add the turnips, butter, and a little sugar.

  3. Set the pan over a hot stove and shake the turnips until they are browned.

  4. Pour in ½ pint of rich, high-seasoned gravy.

  5. Stew the turnips until tender.

  6. Serve the turnips with the gravy poured over them.

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. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Turnip + buttertop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,100 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Turnip + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,330 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Small turnips
Form the main body of the dish and become tender when stewed.
Butter
Fat that helps the turnips brown in the hot pan.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and aids browning of the turnip surfaces.
Rich high seasoned gravy
Supplies moisture and savoury flavour that coats the turnips.

The step that matters

Shaking the turnips until browned. Sugar and butter brown on the hot pan surface through caramelisation and the Maillard reaction. If the pan is not hot enough or the turnips are crowded, they steam instead of browning, losing the colour and flavour that the dish depends on.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar. 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.

You might also like

Turnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes