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Buttered Parsnips

A dish of boiled parsnips tossed in a butter, pepper, salt, and parsley sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 484 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Buttered Parsnips

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the parsnips

  1. Boil the parsnips until tender.

  2. Scrape and slice the parsnips lengthwise.

Make the butter sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter with pepper, salt, and chopped parsley over medium heat.

  2. Add the parsnips to the saucepan.

  3. Shake until the mixture boils.

Serve

  1. Arrange the parsnips on a hot dish.

  2. Pour the butter mixture over the parsnips.

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. Parsnip + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together484 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Parsnip + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

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

  4. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Parsnips
Form the main bulk of the dish and carry the soft, sweet flavour when cooked until tender.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, coating the parsnips and carrying the flavour of the seasonings.

Swap the parsnip

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

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Parsnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, 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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