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Dessert

Cooked Rutabagas

A baked cake made from mashed rutabaga, potato, egg, and nut cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and rutabaga share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 66 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cooked Rutabagas

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Peel and chop the rutabaga and potato.

  2. Boil them until tender, then mash together.

  3. Beat the egg and mix it into the mashed rutabaga and potato.

  4. Form the mixture into cakes with your hands.

Bake and serve

  1. Grease a baking sheet with oil and place the cakes on it.

  2. Brush the tops with nut cream.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) until golden brown.

  4. 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 + rutabagatop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together66 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Rutabaga + potatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together138 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Potato + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,481 recipes

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

  5. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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

Rutabaga
Provides the bulk and starchy body of the cakes.
Potato
Its starch helps the mash firm up and hold together.
Egg
Binds the mashed vegetables so the cakes hold their shape.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Spinachfits about as well
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rutabaga, potato, egg, 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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