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Turnips Stewed in Butter

Turnips stewed gently in butter with salt and white pepper, served with mutton cutlets or alone.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and white pepper work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 275 recipes. Both carry 2-methylbutyraldehyde, which smells malty, chocolate. The science ↓

Turnips Stewed in Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash, dry, and peel the turnips.

  2. Slice the turnips into pieces nearly ½ inch thick and dice them.

Stew

  1. Melt 4 oz of butter in a pan and add the turnips, spreading them out flat.

  2. Stew the turnips gently for 45 minutes to 1 hour.

  3. Add salt and white pepper when they are halfway done.

Serve

  1. Serve the turnips in the center of fried or broiled mutton cutlets, or on their own.

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 + white peppertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together275 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + white peppertop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 soft and tender as they stew.
Butter
Provides fat and moisture, letting the turnips stew gently and carry a rich flavour.

The step that matters

Stew the turnips gently. Gentle heat keeps the turnips tender and moist without scorching the butter or breaking the pieces down into mush. Spreading them flat helps them cook evenly.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, butter. 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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