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Nut Parsnip Stew

A stew of sliced parsnips cooked with water, salt, flour, and nut meat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 669 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Nut Parsnip Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Wash, scrape, and slice the parsnips thinly.

  2. Cook the parsnips in 2 quarts of water until tender.

  3. Add salt when nearly done.

Thicken and serve

  1. Mix flour with a little cold water until smooth, then stir into the pot.

  2. Let it boil until the flour is cooked.

  3. Stir in the nut meat, let it boil once, and serve immediately.

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. Parsnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together669 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Parsnip + meattop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together123 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  3. Flour + meattop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,529 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Parsnips
Form the main body of the stew and give it a sweet, earthy flavour as they cook.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smoother, heavier stew when boiled.
Nut meat
Adds richness and body, and a nutty flavour to the stew.

The step that matters

Boil the flour until cooked. Raw flour stirred into liquid can stay pasty and taste floury. Keeping it boiling long enough lets the starch swell and thicken fully and cooks out the raw flour taste.

Swap the parsnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, meat):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Parsnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, meat. 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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