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Boiled Turnips

Boiled turnips are cooked in salted water until tender, then served with butter, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Boiled Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and wash the turnips.

  2. Cut them into quarters.

Boil

  1. Put them into a saucepan of boiling water and add salt.

  2. Boil the turnips until tender, then drain.

Mash and serve

  1. For mashed turnips, peel and slice 1 quart of turnips and boil in salted water until mashable.

  2. Drain and mash the turnips, then season with salt, pepper, and plenty of butter.

  3. Stir over the fire until all water evaporates, then 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 + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips
Provide the main body of the dish, becoming soft and mashable when boiled.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the mashed turnips a smooth, silky texture.

The step that matters

Stir over the fire until all water evaporates. Turnips hold a lot of water after boiling. Drying them over heat concentrates the flavour and stops the mash from being watery and loose.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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