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Dessert

Turnips a LA Poulette

Turnips à la Poulette is a French-style turnip dish cooked with butter, flour, stock, sugar, egg yolks, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,874 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Turnips a LA Poulette

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turnips

  1. Scrape the turnips and scald them in boiling water.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt some butter in a stewpan.

  2. Add a pinch of flour and mix well.

  3. Moisten the mixture with pale stock.

  4. Add the turnips and a bit of pounded sugar.

  5. Stir in the egg yolks and a small piece of butter.

Serve

  1. Warm and serve.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour 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 dish and soften gently when scalded and simmered in the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a rounded flavour to the sauce and helps it coat the turnips.
Flour
Mixed with butter and stock, its starch thickens the sauce so it clings to the turnips.
Pale stock
Provides the liquid that moistens the flour and butter into a smooth sauce.
Egg yolks
Thicken and enrich the sauce as they warm, giving it a smooth, velvety body.
Sugar
Adds a little sweetness that balances the savoury stock and butter.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat, but if the sauce gets too hot or boils after they go in, the proteins set and curdle. Warm it gently and stir constantly so the sauce stays smooth.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, sugar, egg. 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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