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Creamed Parsnips

Parsnips boiled until tender and served with a flour and butter sauce thinned with hot water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 669 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Creamed Parsnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the parsnips until tender.

  2. In a small pan, mix the butter and flour until well combined.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Add the hot water and set over hot water until melted.

  2. Bring the sauce to a boil and pour it over the drained parsnips.

  3. Serve very 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. Parsnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together669 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Parsnip + buttertop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,051 recipes

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Parsnips
Form the main body of the dish and provide its sweet, starchy flavor and soft texture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by absorbing liquid and gelatinizing as it heats, giving it body.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour and butter into the hot water. Adding the liquid too quickly or without enough mixing can leave lumps of flour. Whisking the butter and flour smooth first and adding the hot water gradually lets starch disperse evenly, so the sauce thickens into a smooth cream when it boils.

Swap the parsnip

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Parsnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour. 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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