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Turnips in White Sauce

Turnips cooked in milk and water, topped with a white sauce and grated cheese, garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,842 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Turnips in White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Peel the small turnips, trying to keep them the same size.

  2. Boil the turnips in equal parts milk and water until tender.

  3. Drain the turnips and cover them with white sauce mixed with the grated cheese.

  4. Sprinkle minced parsley over the top 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. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Milk + cheesetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

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

  3. Cheese + parsleytop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,507 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Turnip + milktop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together865 recipes

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

  5. Milk + parsleytop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,011 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Small turnips
Form the bulk of the dish and soften into a tender, mild vegetable base.
Milk
Makes up half the cooking liquid, adding richness and a mild, creamy flavour to the turnips.
Grated cheese
Melts into the white sauce, adding savoury flavour and a richer, smoother texture.

The step that matters

Boil the turnips until tender. Milk scorches and sticks to the pan if it boils hard, and the turnips cook unevenly if they are not similar in size. A gentle simmer keeps the milk smooth and lets the turnips soften evenly.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, cheese, parsley):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cheese, parsley. 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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