Skip to main content
Main

Parsnips Boiled, with Cream Sauce

Boiled young and old parsnips served with cream sauce or English drawn butter, accompanied by corned beef or boiled salt fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsnip and beef work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 377 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Parsnips Boiled, with Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scrape young parsnips and place them in cold water to prevent discoloration.

  2. Pare and cut old parsnips into quarters lengthwise.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil the parsnips in a saucepan of boiling water until tender: 45 minutes for young and 1 hour 15 minutes for old.

  2. Drain the parsnips and arrange them on a heated dish with the heads all facing the same way.

  3. Cover with cream sauce or English drawn butter and serve with corned beef or boiled salt fish.

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 + beeftop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together377 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Parsnip + creamtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together325 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  3. Cream + beeftop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,128 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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 sweet as they cook through.
Cream sauce or english drawn butter
Adds richness and moisture, coating the cooked parsnips with fat.

The step that matters

Boiling until tender. Young and old parsnips need different cooking times, and undercooked root vegetables stay firm and starchy. Cooking until a knife slides through the centre gives a soft texture and lets the natural starches turn sweet and tender.

Swap the parsnip

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

  1. Onionfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Parsnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, beef. 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.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes