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Young Turnips Stewed with Cream

A stew of young turnips cooked in cream or milk, thickened with a roux and seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Young Turnips Stewed with Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turnips

  1. Pare the young turnips and soak them in cold water for one hour.

  2. Cook the turnips tender in two changes of water.

Make the cream sauce

  1. Drain the turnips and cover them with hot cream (heated with a pinch of baking soda) or hot milk if you don't have cream.

  2. Simmer gently for five minutes.

  3. Stir in a white roux made by cooking together the butter and flour.

  4. Season with salt and pepper.

Serve

  1. Serve very 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. 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Young turnips
Provide the main vegetable body and mild, sweet flavour of the dish.
Hot cream
Adds richness and a smooth, coating texture to the turnips.
Butter
Forms the fat base of the roux that thickens the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the cream into a smooth sauce when cooked with butter as a roux.
Baking soda
Raises the pH of the cream, which helps soften the turnips further.

The step that matters

Stir in the white roux. Flour must be cooked with butter before the sauce is added, or it stays raw-tasting and lumpy. Stirring it into hot liquid gradually keeps the sauce smooth and evenly thickened.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

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