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Fricassee of Parsnips

A creamy parsnip fricassee made with mashed parsnips, cream, butter, broth, mace, flour, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Fricassee of Parsnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the parsnips

  1. Boil the parsnips until tender.

  2. Scrape and mash them into a stew pan.

Make the fricassee

  1. Add cream, butter, pepper, and salt to the mashed parsnips.

  2. In a separate pan, simmer the parsnips cut lengthwise in a white sauce made of broth, mace, cream, butter, flour, pepper, and salt.

  3. Serve warm.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Parsnip + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 dish, providing starch, sweetness and a soft, mashed texture.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, giving the sauce a smooth, silky body.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel in the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the white sauce so it coats the parsnips instead of running thin.

The step that matters

Thickening the white sauce. Flour must be cooked briefly in butter before liquid is added, and the sauce simmered gently while stirring. This cooks out the raw starch taste and lets the starch swell evenly, so the sauce thickens smoothly without lumps.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsnip, cream, butter, pepper, flour. 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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