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Glazed Turnips

Glazed turnips are boiled and then sautéed with butter, sugar, stock, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Glazed Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and wash the turnips, then cut them into quarters.

  2. Place the turnips in a pot of salted water and bring to a boil.

Glaze and serve

  1. Transfer the turnips to a well-buttered small frying pan.

  2. Sprinkle the turnips with caster sugar.

  3. Once the turnips begin to color, add a little stock and season with pepper and salt.

  4. Let the turnips stew slowly until tender.

  5. Serve the turnips with the sauce poured over them.

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. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Turnip + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,330 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Young turnips
The main vegetable, becoming tender and mildly sweet as it cooks and glazes.
Butter
Fat that enriches the glaze and helps the turnips brown in the pan.
Sugar
Sweetness that caramelizes as the turnips color, giving the glaze its golden surface.
Stock
Liquid that loosens the browned sugar and butter into a sauce while the turnips stew.

The step that matters

Adding the stock once the turnips begin to color. Sugar browns quickly in a dry pan and can burn. Adding a little stock at this point stops the browning, lifts the caramelized bits into the sauce, and keeps the glaze from turning bitter.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, 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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