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Boiled Turnips

A boiled turnip dish with optional pork, seasoned with salt, pepper, and butter.

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 ↓

Boiled Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and slice the turnips.

Cook

  1. If serving in slices, boil the pork for 3 hours.

  2. Add the turnips to the pork.

  3. Cook the turnips: white turnips for 45 minutes, yellow turnips for 2 hours.

  4. For mashed turnips, cook as above without pork.

Serve

  1. Serve the turnips in slices without seasoning if cooked with pork.

  2. Season mashed turnips with salt, pepper, and butter.

  3. If the white turnip is watery, mash with a few mealy potatoes.

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. Turnip + porktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,358 recipes

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

  3. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  4. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips
The main vegetable; they become tender and sweet-mild as they cook slowly.
Pork
Adds savory flavor to the cooking water and the turnips when used.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the mashed turnips for a smoother, more flavorful finish.

The step that matters

Cook the turnips for the right time. White and yellow turnips need very different cooking times. Undercooked turnips stay firm and bitter, while overcooked ones turn watery and fall apart, so matching the time to the variety matters.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Onionfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, pepper, butter. 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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