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Stewed Turnips

A simple stew of quartered turnips cooked in butter and stock with pepper, salt, sugar, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,015 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Stewed Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, combine the quartered turnips and butter.

  2. Toss them on the fire for a minute or two.

  3. Pour in enough stock to cover turnips.

  4. Add pepper, salt, sugar, and nutmeg.

  5. Let the turnips stew slowly until tender.

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. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  2. Turnip + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together377 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

New turnips
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and soft as they stew.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping the turnips brown lightly and carry flavor.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the turnips' natural bitterness.

The step that matters

Let the turnips stew slowly until tender. Gentle, slow simmering lets the turnips soften evenly all the way through. Boiling hard can break the pieces apart and leave the outsides mushy before the centers are tender.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, sugar, nutmeg. 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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