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Cream Turnips

A creamy turnip dish made by stewing turnips and coating them with a butter and starch sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Cream Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the turnips

  1. Stew the turnips in water until tender.

Make the sauce

  1. In a double boiler, heat the milk.

  2. Mix the butter with the corn starch or flour, then stir into the hot milk.

  3. Season the sauce with salt and pepper.

Combine and rest

  1. Drain the turnips and add them to the sauce in the boiler.

  2. Let it stand for 10 minutes without boiling.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  4. Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Turnip + corntop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together208 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender as they are stewed.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the cream sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smoother mouthfeel.
Corn starch or flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, creamy sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the starch into the milk without boiling. Starch must be mixed with fat first so it disperses without lumps, and the sauce should stay below a boil. Overheating can break the thickened sauce or make it grainy, so let it stand gently instead of boiling.

Swap the turnip

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, corn, pepper. 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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