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Turnips with Cream Sauce

Creamed turnips are boiled turnips topped with a butter, flour, and milk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Turnips with Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turnips

  1. Wash and peel the turnips, then slice them into 1‑inch pieces.

  2. Cook the turnips in boiling water with the salt until tender, then drain.

  3. Place the turnips in a hot vegetable dish.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In a saucepan, blend the butter and flour with a pinch of salt.

  2. Add the hot milk and bring to a boil, stirring constantly.

  3. Pour the sauce over the turnips, sprinkle with pepper, and serve.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Turnip + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Turnips
Form the main body of the dish, providing the vegetable bulk and mild sweetness when cooked tender.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and with the flour helps begin the sauce base.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, creamy sauce when cooked with the butter.
Milk
Forms the liquid of the sauce, giving it a creamy texture and body.

The step that matters

Stirring the milk into the butter and flour. Adding the hot milk and stirring constantly keeps the flour dispersed so the sauce thickens smoothly instead of forming lumps.

Swap the turnip

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, milk, 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.

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