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Stewed Turnips with Onions

A stew of turnips and onions cooked in butter and broth, finished with a mustard and nutmeg sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 290 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Stewed Turnips with Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare the turnips and cut them into four or six pieces, trimming the edges.

  2. Peel the onions and place them in a saucepan with the turnips.

Cook

  1. Add enough water or broth to cover the vegetables, along with the butter and salt.

  2. Cover the saucepan and cook until the turnips are tender.

  3. Drain off the broth and transfer the turnips and onions to a deep vegetable dish.

Finish and serve

  1. In a separate bowl, mix the butter sauce with mustard flour and nutmeg.

  2. Pour the sauce over the turnips just 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 + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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 stew and soften into tender pieces as they cook.
White onions
Add sweetness and aroma as they cook gently in the broth.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour into the sauce and vegetables.
Mustard flour
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that thickens the sauce slightly and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Cover the saucepan and cook until the turnips are tender. Gentle covered cooking traps steam so the turnips soften evenly without drying out. Cooking too hard or uncovered can break the pieces or reduce the broth too fast, leaving the vegetables tough or scorched.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, butter, mustard, flour, nutmeg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, butter, mustard, flour, 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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