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Mashed Turnips

A simple side dish of boiled turnips mashed with peanut cream and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and peanut work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 26 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Mashed Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare the turnips and cut them into halves or quarters.

  2. Drop the turnips into boiling salted water and cook until tender.

  3. Drain the turnips thoroughly.

Finish and serve

  1. Add enough thick raw peanut cream to season well, and more salt if needed.

  2. Mash the turnips until fine and serve hot.

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 + peanuttop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together26 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Peanut + creamtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Turnip + creamtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together797 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips
Form the main body of the dish, becoming soft and mashable once cooked through.
Thick raw peanut cream
Adds richness and fat, giving the mash a smooth, creamy texture and nutty flavour.

The step that matters

Drain the turnips thoroughly. Excess cooking water left on the turnips dilutes the mash and makes it loose and watery. Draining well keeps the texture thick and lets the added cream season it properly.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peanut, cream):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Welsh onionfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peanut, cream. 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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