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Spring Turnips in Cream Sauce

A dish of diced young turnips simmered in a seasoned cream sauce and garnished with parsley.

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

Spring Turnips in Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and dice the young turnips.

  2. Cook the turnips in minimal water until tender, adding salt near the end.

  3. Prepare a seasoned cream sauce.

Combine and serve

  1. Drain the turnips and add them to the sauce.

  2. Add a tiny pinch of mace to the sauce if desired.

  3. Heat until just boiling, then remove from heat.

  4. Transfer to a serving dish and sprinkle with parsley.

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. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Parsley + macetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Cream + macetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,009 recipes
  5. Turnip + saucetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together943 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Young turnips
Provide the main body of the dish, becoming soft and tender when cooked.
Cream sauce
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy texture that coats the turnips.

The step that matters

Heat until just boiling, then remove from heat. Boiling a cream sauce hard can cause it to separate or turn grainy, so heat only until it just reaches a boil and then take it off the heat.

Swap the mace

The recipe marks mace as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, cream, sauce, parsley):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, cream, sauce, 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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