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Turnips with Mustard Sauce

Turnips cooked in butter and mustard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Turnips with Mustard Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and cut the turnips into equal-sized pieces.

  2. Blanch the turnips in boiling water.

Cook and serve

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan.

  2. Add the blanched turnips to the melted butter and stew gently.

  3. Once tender, remove the turnips and place them on a dish.

  4. Mix the mustard and salt into the sauce in the stewpan and pour over the 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. Turnip + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + mustardtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,003 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Turnip + buttertop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,100 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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, becoming tender as they stew gently in butter.
Butter
Provides fat and richness, carrying flavour as the turnips stew and forming the base of the sauce.
Mustard
Adds a sharp, pungent bite that contrasts with the sweetness of the cooked turnips.

The step that matters

Stewing the blanched turnips gently. Stewing over low heat softens the turnips through without browning or breaking them. High heat can scorch the butter and toughen or mash the pieces, so they should be checked until tender.

Swap the turnip

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, mustard. 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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