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Boiled Turnips with White Sauce

A boiled turnip dish served with a white sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,842 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Turnips with White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turnips

  1. Pare and slice the turnips.

  2. Parboil them for 5 minutes and drain.

Brown the turnips

  1. In a saucepan, melt a piece of butter and add a little sugar.

  2. Add the turnips and toss over heat until lightly colored.

Cook and finish the sauce

  1. Add 8 cups of white broth and a bundle of parsley with 2 leeks.

  2. Cover and cook until well done.

  3. Skim the broth, remove the parsley bundle, and strain the soup.

  4. Return to heat, season to taste, and stir in 6 ounces of butter.

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. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

White turnips
Form the main body of the dish and soften into a tender vegetable during cooking.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky texture to the finished broth when stirred in at the end.
Sugar
Helps the turnips brown lightly in the melted butter through caramelization.

The step that matters

Lightly coloring the turnips. Toss them in the melted butter and sugar over heat only until lightly colored. Sugar browns quickly, so overheating can scorch it and make the dish taste bitter.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, butter, sugar, sauce. 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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