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Dessert

Turnips with Sugar

Turnips cooked with butter, soup, sugar, salt, cinnamon, and covered with buttered paper until jelly-like.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 125 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Turnips with Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Shape the turnips into pears.

  2. Blanch and drain them.

Cook

  1. Butter the bottom of a stew-pan and arrange the turnips inside.

  2. Add the soup, sugar, salt, and cinnamon.

  3. Cover with buttered paper and cook on low heat.

  4. Once cooked, uncover and let them come to a jelly.

Serve

  1. Serve on a dish with a fork and add twigs for stalks.

  2. Use a little soup to detach the jelly and remove the cinnamon.

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 + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together125 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Butter + cinnamontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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, becoming tender as they cook gently in the liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping the bottom of the turnips brown lightly and keeping them from sticking.
Soup
Provides the cooking liquid and moisture that braises the turnips and later reduces to a glaze.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, as the liquid reduces, helps form a glossy, syrupy coating.
Cinnamon
Adds a warm aroma that infuses the cooking liquid and is removed before serving.

The step that matters

Let the liquid reduce to a jelly. Cooking covered on low heat softens the turnips gently. Uncovering lets the soup and sugar reduce and thicken into a glaze. Too much heat can scorch the sugar and make the glaze bitter.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, cinnamon. 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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