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Turnips, with White Sauce

Turnips simmered in gravy, served with a creamy white sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and arrowroot share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Turnips, with White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the turnips

  1. Prepare the turnips and stew them in gravy until tender.

  2. Lift the turnips out carefully to avoid breaking them and drain them.

  3. Place the turnips in a serving dish.

Make the white sauce

  1. Mix the arrowroot smoothly with the cream or milk.

  2. Gradually mix the gravy with the arrowroot mixture and return it to the saucepan.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil, then remove from heat.

  4. Stir in the cold butter until dissolved.

  5. Pour the sauce over the turnips and serve hot.

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 + arrowroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Cream + arrowroottop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  4. Turnip + buttertop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,100 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Turnip + creamtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together797 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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 become tender when stewed in gravy.
Arrowroot
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, glossy sauce when heated.
Cream or milk
Adds richness and body to the sauce, softening its flavor.
Cold butter
Adds fat and a silky finish to the sauce when stirred in off the heat.

The step that matters

Bring the mixture to a boil, then remove from heat.. Arrowroot thickens when heated but can thin out if it is overcooked or kept boiling, so the sauce should be brought to a boil and taken off the heat promptly.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Turnipthe original
  3. Beetrootfits about as well
  4. Leekfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, arrowroot, 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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