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Turnips, Boiled and Served with Sauce

Boiled turnips served with nutmeg, melted butter, and optional mustard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 290 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Turnips, Boiled and Served with Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the turnips

  1. Boil the turnips until tender, about 20 minutes to 1.5 hours depending on size.

  2. Place the boiled turnips in a serving dish.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Grate a little nutmeg over the turnips.

  2. Pour melted butter over the turnips.

  3. If desired, mix 2 teaspoons of mustard into the butter before pouring it over the turnips.

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 + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together377 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Nutmeg + mustardtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Nutmeg + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Butter + mustardtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,003 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 and soften into a tender texture when boiled.
Butter
Adds richness and a glossy coating that carries flavour over the turnips.
Nutmeg
Adds a warm, aromatic note that complements the mild turnips.
Mustard
Adds a sharp, pungent bite that cuts through the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Boil the turnips until tender. Heat softens the starch and breaks down the cell walls, but cooking time varies a lot with size. Cutting turnips to similar sizes or testing them with a knife helps avoid pieces that are still firm inside or overcooked outside.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, butter, mustard. 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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