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Boiled Turnips

Turnips boiled in beef pot liquor, served with parsley or cresses garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,842 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and quarter the turnips.

  2. Strain and heat the pot liquor from the boiling beef.

  3. While boiling hot, add the turnips.

  4. Cook until soft but not breaking.

Serve

  1. Drain the turnips and arrange them around the beef on a serving dish.

  2. Garnish with parsley sprigs or cresses.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + beeftop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,940 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  3. Beef + parsleytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,866 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips
Form the main vegetable, becoming soft and tender as they simmer in the liquor.
Pot liquor from boiling beef
Cooks the turnips while adding savoury beefy flavour to them.

The step that matters

Cook until soft but not breaking. Turnips continue to soften after leaving the heat, and cooking too long causes the pieces to fall apart. Testing with a knife tip helps you stop at the right point.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, beef):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, beef. 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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