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Boiled Turnip Radishes

Boiled turnip radishes served with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and radish share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Turnip Radishes

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil turnip radishes in plenty of salted water for about 25 minutes until tender.

  2. Drain the radishes well.

  3. Serve them with melted butter.

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 + radishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together35 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Radish + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together180 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Turnip + buttertop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,100 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Turnip radishes
Become tender and mild through boiling, forming the main body of the dish.
Melted butter
Adds fat and richness, coating the cooked radishes with a smooth flavour.

The step that matters

Drain the radishes well. Excess water left on boiled vegetables dilutes the butter and makes the dish watery. Draining thoroughly lets the butter cling to the surface and keeps the flavour concentrated.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (radish, butter):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Cucumberfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against radish, butter. 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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