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Stuffed Turnips

Turnips filled with various creamy or pureed vegetable mixtures, garnished with truffle, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and carrot 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 ↓

Stuffed Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Select turnips of uniform size and cut out the center.

  2. Cook the turnips in boiling salted water until tender.

Fill and serve

  1. Fill the turnips with one of the following mixtures: creamed peas, pea puree, chopped cooked carrots and string beans seasoned with cream, salt, and pepper, or a puree of chestnuts or creamed mushrooms.

  2. Garnish the top with a slice of truffle.

  3. Serve hot as a vegetable or as a garnish for a fillet of beef or crown roast.

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 + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + chestnuttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together46 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Beans + chestnuttop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together56 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Turnip + beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + beanstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips
Serve as the edible shell that holds the filling and softens when cooked.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the filling.
Peas
Provide the base for the creamed peas or pea puree filling.
Chestnuts
Make a starchy, smooth puree that gives the filling body and mild sweetness.
Mushrooms
Add savory, earthy flavour when creamed into the filling.

The step that matters

Cook the turnips until tender. Turnips must be fully softened so they can be easily eaten with the filling. Undercooked turnips stay firm and bitter-tasting, while overcooked ones collapse and lose their shape.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, cream, pepper, carrot, beans, chestnut, mushroom):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Cashew nutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, cream, pepper, carrot, beans, chestnut, mushroom. 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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