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Turnips in Cream

A creamy side dish of boiled turnips simmered in milk and thickened with flour, finished with butter, salt, and pepper.

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 ↓

Turnips in Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook the turnips

  1. Peel the turnips and cut them into small pieces.

  2. Boil the turnips until tender, then drain.

Make the creamed sauce

  1. Add enough milk to nearly cover the turnips.

  2. When the milk boils, thicken it with a little flour mixed with cold milk.

  3. Add butter, coarse sea salt, and black pepper.

  4. Boil for two minutes and serve.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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 main body of the dish, becoming tender when boiled.
Milk
Provides the liquid that becomes the creamy sauce around the turnips.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, creamy sauce that clings to the turnips.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening the milk with flour. Flour must be mixed smoothly with cold milk before it goes into the boiling milk; added dry or lumpy, it forms clumps instead of an even sauce. Starch thickens as it heats, so the sauce needs to boil briefly to reach full thickness.

Swap the turnip

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

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

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