Name: Stuffed Turnips
Ingredients: 6 turnips, even in size; 2 teaspoons milk; 1 tablespoon butter; ¼ teaspoon chopped onion; 2 slices bacon; ½ cup fresh bread crumbs; Salt and pepper to taste

Why it works: Turnip and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Stuffed Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turnips

Boil turnips until tender.
Cut off the tops and scoop out the centers.

Make the filling

Chop the centers with bacon, onion, bread crumbs, and milk.
Fry the mixture in butter.

Fill and bake

Fill the turnip shells with the mixture.
Sprinkle with crumbs and place a piece of butter on each.
Bake for 10 minutes.

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.

Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,585 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Turnip + peppertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,252 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,466 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips: Form the edible shell that holds the filling.
Bacon: Adds fat and savory flavor to the filling as it fries.
Bread crumbs: Absorb moisture and give the filling body and a lightly crisp texture.
Butter: Adds fat for frying the filling and richness on top, encouraging browning.
Milk: Moistens the filling so the bread crumbs soften and bind it.

Swap the turnip

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

Potatofits better
Capsicumfits better
Tomatofits better
Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, onion, bread, 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.