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Fricassee of Parsnips

A creamy parsnip dish with toast, milk, cream, mace, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Fricassee of Parsnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the parsnips

  1. Wash and peel the parsnips.

  2. Cut them lengthwise into pieces two or three inches long.

  3. Boil in milk until quite tender.

Make the sauce

  1. Make a white sauce, adding ½ cup cream and 1 blade of mace.

  2. Add the parsnip pieces to the sauce and simmer for five minutes.

Serve

  1. Place a piece of toasted bread on a dish.

  2. Lay the parsnips on the toast and pour the sauce over.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Parsnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together669 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Parsnips
Provide the main vegetable body and sweet, starchy flavour that the sauce coats.
Milk
Cooks the parsnips gently to tenderness while adding a mild, creamy richness.
Flour
Thickens the white sauce so it clings to the parsnips instead of running off.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavour to the white sauce and helps form its base.
Cream
Adds richness and smoothness to the sauce, giving it a softer, silkier texture.

The step that matters

Boil in milk until quite tender. Parsnips must be fully softened before saucing, because they will not become tender in the short simmer that follows and would stay fibrous.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsnip, milk, flour, butter, cream):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsnip, milk, flour, butter, cream. 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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