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To Boil Turnips and Jerusalem Artichokes

A boiled dish of turnips and Jerusalem artichokes served with butter, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and jerusalem artichoke share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 74 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

To Boil Turnips and Jerusalem Artichokes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and boil the small turnips

  1. Pare old turnips deeply.

  2. Peel small turnips but do not pare them.

  3. Boil the turnips until tender.

Serve the small turnips

  1. Serve small ones whole with melted butter.

Cut and boil the large turnips

  1. Cut large turnips into pieces before boiling.

  2. Boil large turnip pieces.

  3. Serve them as pieces or mash with butter, pepper, and salt.

Boil and serve the Jerusalem artichokes

  1. Boil Jerusalem artichokes.

  2. Peel them after boiling.

  3. Serve like small 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 + jerusalem artichoketop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together74 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Jerusalem artichoke + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together210 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Jerusalem artichoke + buttertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together267 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl decanoate (grape, waxy).

  5. Butter + peppertop 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
Starchy root that softens into tender pieces or a soft mash when boiled.
Jerusalem artichokes
Starchy tuber that turns tender when boiled and can be served like turnips.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and moistens the cooked vegetables.

The step that matters

Peeling the Jerusalem artichokes after boiling. Boiling softens the tuber and loosens its skin, so it can be peeled more easily. Peeling a raw artichoke is harder and wastes more of the flesh.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Turnipthe original
  3. Kalefits about as well
  4. Shallotfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against jerusalem artichoke, 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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