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Duck with Turnips

A duck stewed with turnips, butter, powdered sugar, sea salt, and black pepper.

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

Duck with Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turnips

  1. Cut the turnips into half-quarters.

  2. Melt the butter in a stewpan.

  3. Add the turnip pieces to the pan and brown them.

Stew the duck

  1. Pour the sauce from the duck gradually over the browned turnips.

  2. Let everything simmer for a moment.

  3. Place the duck on the turnips and let it stew for 30 minutes.

Serve

  1. Transfer the duck to a hot dish and arrange the turnips around it.

  2. Pour the sauce over the duck 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 + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Turnip + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,330 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Duck
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender as it stews in the sauce.
Turnips
Absorb flavour from the sauce and soften as they stew, while browning adds savoury depth.
Butter
Carries heat for browning the turnips and adds richness to the dish.

The step that matters

Brown the turnips in the butter. Browning develops deeper, savoury flavour through Maillard reactions. Pieces that are pale or crowded in the pan steam instead, leaving the finished dish tasting flat.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, 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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