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Turnip Pie

A savory pie of mutton and diced turnips baked under a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Turnip Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Season mutton-chops with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  2. Reserve the ends of the neck-bones to lay over the diced turnips.

  3. Cut turnips into small dice and place them on the steaks.

  4. Add 2 or 3 good spoonfuls of milk.

  5. Optionally, add sliced onion.

Bake

  1. Cover with a pie crust and bake until golden.

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 + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + turniptop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,442 recipes

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

  5. Mutton + oniontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,531 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton-chops
Provide the rich, savoury meat that forms the body of the pie.
Turnips
Add moisture and a mild sweetness as they soften during baking.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness to the filling, helping it stay tender.
Pie crust
Encloses the filling and browns in the oven to form the golden top.

Swap the turnip

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, pepper, milk, onion. 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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