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Carrots, Parsnips, Beets, and Turnips

A boiled mixture of carrots, parsnips, beets, and turnips served with butter, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 590 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Carrots, Parsnips, Beets, and Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Rub and wash the carrots and parsnips well, but do not scrape them.

  2. Wash the beets thoroughly, avoiding scraping to retain color.

  3. Wash and peel the turnips.

Boil and rub

  1. Boil the carrots and parsnips until tender.

  2. Rub the skins of the boiled carrots and parsnips with a coarse cloth.

  3. Boil the beets until tender, then rub with a rough cloth.

  4. Boil the turnips, preferably with fresh pork.

  5. For added flavor, boil carrots and parsnips with a small piece of pork.

Serve

  1. Serve the vegetables with melted butter, seasoned with pepper and coarse sea salt.

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. Parsnip + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  5. Parsnip + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Sweetness and body; they hold their shape and flavor through boiling.
Parsnips
Sweetness and a soft, starchy texture when boiled until tender.
Beets
Provide colour, which is kept by leaving the skin unscraped during cooking.
Turnips
Add a mild, slightly peppery flavour and firm texture to the mix.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour over the boiled vegetables.

The step that matters

Boil the vegetables without scraping them. Unpeeled skins protect the colour and nutrients inside during boiling, and loosen cleanly afterward. Scraping lets colour bleed out and the vegetables lose flavour into the water.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Turnipthe original
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits less well
  4. Beetrootfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, parsnip, 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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