Name: Boiled Parsnips
Ingredients: parsnips; water; coarse sea salt; butter

Why it works: Parsnip and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,051 recipes. Both carry beta-pinene, which smells pine, resin. The science ↓

Boiled Parsnips

Ingredients

parsnips
water
coarse sea salt
butter

Directions

Boil parsnips in plenty of water with coarse sea salt until tender.
Serve them on a dish by themselves or cut them into slices.
Toss the slices in a good amount of butter before serving.

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.

Parsnip + buttertop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,051 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-pinene (pine, resin).

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

What each ingredient does

Parsnips: The main vegetable; boiling softens its starches until tender.
Butter: Adds fat and rich flavour, coating the slices and keeping them moist.

“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.