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Carrots and Turnips a LA Poulbtte

A creamy sauce of butter, flour, stock, cream, eggs, and lemon coats boiled carrots and turnips.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Carrots and Turnips a LA Poulbtte

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Wash the carrots and turnips. Scrape the carrots and turnips.

  2. Cut the carrots and turnips into fancy shapes.

  3. Cover the vegetables with boiling water and let them stand for five minutes.

  4. Drain the vegetables.

Cook the vegetables

  1. Cook the vegetables in boiling salted water with ½ tablespoon butter until soft.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate pan, melt 3 tablespoons butter.

  2. Add 3 tablespoons flour to the melted butter.

  3. Gradually pour in 1 cup white stock and bring to a boil.

  4. Once boiling, add ½ cup cream, 2 egg yolks, and ½ tablespoon lemon juice.

  5. Season with salt and pepper.

  6. Combine the sauce with the drained vegetables.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melted with flour to form a roux that thickens the sauce and adds richness.
Flour
Forms a roux with melted butter, thickening the stock into a smooth sauce.
White stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as it comes to a boil.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky, smooth texture to the sauce.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce, giving it body and a creamy texture.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks and cream. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat. If the sauce is boiling hard when they go in, they can scramble and turn grainy. Remove the pan from the heat first, or add them off the boil.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, butter, flour, cream, egg, lemon, pepper):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, butter, flour, cream, egg, lemon, 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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