Skip to main content
Main

Mashed Turnips

Mashed turnips are boiled, pounded, and seasoned with salt, pepper, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turnip and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,252 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Mashed Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the turnips and slice them.

  2. If they are old, parboil for 5 minutes.

Cook

  1. Place the turnips in a saucepan, cover with boiling water, and season with coarse sea salt.

  2. Cover the saucepan and boil until tender.

  3. Drain the turnips in a colander and let them dry.

Mash and serve

  1. Pound the turnips through a fine colander back into the saucepan.

  2. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper, add a piece of butter, and mix well.

  3. Warm the mixture thoroughly before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Turnip + buttertop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,100 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips
Provide the main body and mild, sweet flavour of the mash once cooked and pounded smooth.
Butter
Adds fat for a smoother, richer texture and a rounder flavour.

The step that matters

Drain and dry the turnips before mashing. Excess cooking water dilutes the flavour and makes the mash loose and watery. Letting the turnips dry in the colander lets surface moisture evaporate, so the pounded mixture holds together better.

Swap the turnip

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

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

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

You might also like

Turnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes