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Parsnips with Egg Sauce

Parsnips served with a sauce made from eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and sauce work together. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 156 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Parsnips with Egg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Clean and slice the parsnips.

  2. Cook the parsnips in boiling water until tender, adding coarse sea salt while cooking.

  3. Drain any remaining water from the parsnips.

Serve

  1. Pour egg sauce over the cooked 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 + saucetop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together156 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Parsnip + eggtop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together442 recipes

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

  3. Egg + saucetop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,895 recipes

Egg and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,895 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Parsnips
Form the main body of the dish, becoming soft and tender when boiled.
Egg sauce
Adds richness and a creamy, coating texture to the parsnips.

The step that matters

Drain the parsnips well. Water left on the cooked parsnips dilutes the egg sauce, making it thin and runny so it does not cling well to the vegetables.

Swap the parsnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sauce):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Parsnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sauce. 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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