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Mashed Turnips

Mashed turnips are boiled, mashed, and seasoned with salt, butter, and optional sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,252 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Mashed Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and wash the turnips.

  2. Boil them until tender.

  3. Drain the turnips in a colander and press out all the water.

Mash and season

  1. Mash the turnips very fine in a pan.

  2. Season with coarse sea salt and butter.

  3. If the turnips are not sweet, add 1 teaspoon of white sugar.

Serve

  1. Serve hot, with a little black pepper on top.

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. Turnip + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. 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

Turnips
Form the main body of the dish; mashing breaks down their cell structure into a smooth, soft texture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, silkier mouthfeel to the mash.
White sugar
Adds sweetness to balance turnips that taste bitter or earthy.

The step that matters

Press out all the water after draining. Turnips hold a lot of water. Any left in the mash dilutes flavour and makes it loose and watery, so pressing them dry in the colander helps the mash hold a thick, smooth texture.

Swap the turnip

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, 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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