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Creamed Parsnips

A side dish of boiled parsnips mixed with butter, salt, pepper, parsley, and a sweet cream flour mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 484 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Creamed Parsnips

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the parsnips

  1. Boil the parsnips until tender, then slice them lengthwise.

Make the creamed sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the parsnips with butter, salt, pepper, and minced parsley.

  2. Shake the mixture until it boils.

  3. In a separate bowl, mix the sweet cream with flour, then add to the saucepan.

  4. Let the mixture come to a boil and pour it over the parsnips.

Serve

  1. 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. Parsnip + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together484 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  5. Parsnip + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Parsnips
Provide the main body and tender, sweet vegetable texture of the dish.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, coating the parsnips and giving a smooth mouthfeel.
Sweet cream
Adds moisture and creaminess, forming the sauce that coats the parsnips.
Flour
Thickens the cream as its starch swells when the mixture boils.

The step that matters

Bring the cream and flour mixture to a full boil. Flour starch only swells and thickens the cream when heated to boiling. If it stays below a boil, the sauce stays thin and can taste raw and pasty.

Swap the parsnip

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

  1. Shallotfits about as well
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Parsnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, parsley, cream, 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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