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Boiled Turnips

A simple boiled turnip dish with optional pork and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Boiled Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and slice the turnips.

Boil

  1. Boil the pork for 3 hours.

  2. Add the turnips to the pork.

  3. Boil for 45 minutes for white turnips or 2 hours for yellow turnips.

Serve

  1. Serve the turnips in slices without seasoning if boiled with pork.

  2. Omit the pork.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, and butter.

  4. If the white turnip is watery, mash with a few mealy potatoes.

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. Turnip + porktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,358 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  3. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  4. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips
Make up the main body of the dish, becoming soft and tender as they boil.
Pork
Flavors the cooking water as it simmers, giving the turnips a savory taste.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, smoothing the flavor of the cooked turnips.

The step that matters

Boil for 45 minutes for white turnips or 2 hours for yellow turnips. Turnips of different colors need different cooking times. Undercooked turnips stay firm and starchy, while overcooked ones turn watery and fall apart, so the cook should match the time to the variety.

Swap the turnip

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, 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.

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