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Salad

Turnip Salad

A salad of boiled turnips dressed with a creamy, sweetened butter and vinegar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Turnip Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turnips

  1. Pare and slice the turnips into small pieces.

  2. Boil the turnips until tender, then drain the water.

Make the dressing

  1. In a saucepan, combine milk or cream, flour, sugar, butter, vinegar, salt, and pepper.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil and cook until it thickens.

Assemble

  1. Pour the dressing over the cooked turnips.

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. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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 salad and absorb the dressing as the base vegetable.
Milk or cream
Adds richness and body to the dressing, giving it a creamy texture.
Flour
Thickens the dressing as it cooks, so it coats the turnips instead of running off.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, rounding out the sharpness of the vinegar.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the sweetness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that offsets the sharpness of the vinegar.

The step that matters

Cook the dressing until it thickens. Flour only thickens when the liquid is brought to a boil and cooked for a while, as its starch swells in heat. Stopping early leaves a thin dressing that does not coat the turnips.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

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