Name: To Mash Turnips
Ingredients: turnips; butter

Why it works: Turnip and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,100 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Mash Turnips

Ingredients

turnips
butter

Directions

Boil the turnips until tender.
Squeeze them dry and place in a saucepan.
Mash the turnips with a wooden spoon and rub through a colander.
Add a little butter and stir until melted and well mixed.

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 + buttertop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,100 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

Turnips: Provide the main body of the dish, which becomes soft and smooth when mashed.
Butter: Adds richness and a silky texture as it melts into the mash.

“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.