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Turxips in White Sauce

A dish of boiled turnips topped with a white sauce of milk, rice, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Turxips in White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turnips

  1. Peel and cut the turnips into pear or marble shapes.

  2. Boil the turnips in salted water with a little butter until tender.

  3. Remove the turnips and arrange them on a dish.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, boil the milk with the rice and lemon peel until the rice is tender.

  2. Remove the lemon peel and blend the milk and rice together.

  3. Return the mixture to the saucepan to warm.

  4. Add mace and salt, then bring to a boil.

  5. Pour the sauce over the turnips.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  3. Turnip + ricetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together824 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together770 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips
Provide the main vegetable body and mild, sweet flavour of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and giving the turnips a smooth finish.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, giving it body and a creamy texture.
Rice
Cooked soft and blended into the milk, it thickens the sauce and gives it body.

The step that matters

Blending the rice and milk. Rice must be fully tender before blending, because unsoftened grains leave a gritty texture. Starch from the rice thickens the milk as it is blended and warmed, so the sauce stays smooth.

Flavor stand-ins for the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, butter, milk, rice, lemon):

  1. Parsleybetter flavor fit
  2. Cinnamonbetter flavor fit
  3. Thymebetter flavor fit
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, butter, milk, rice, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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