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Salad

Creamed Turnips Salad

A salad of sliced turnips mixed with cream, flour, butter, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Creamed Turnips Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turnips

  1. Slice the turnips thinly.

  2. Boil the turnips in salted water until tender.

  3. Drain the water off the turnips.

Make the cream sauce

  1. In a separate bowl, mix the flour with a little milk until smooth.

  2. Pour the cream over the turnips and add the flour mixture.

  3. Add pepper and butter, then heat on the stove.

  4. Just before serving, stir in the vinegar.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Turnip + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Turnips
Form the bulk of the salad and carry the creamy sauce.
Cream
Provides richness and a smooth, velvety texture when heated.
Flour
Thickens the cream so the sauce clings to the turnips.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream and balances flavour.

The step that matters

Stirring in the vinegar just before serving. Acid can thin or curdle cream when it is heated for a long time, so adding the vinegar at the end keeps the sauce smooth and its tang fresh.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, flour, milk, pepper, butter, vinegar. 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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