Name: Turnip Salad
Ingredients: Cold boiled turnips; Sliced beetroot; Salad dressing

Why it works: Turnip and beetroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 336 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Turnip Salad

Ingredients

Cold boiled turnips
Sliced beetroot
Salad dressing

Directions

Slice the cold boiled turnips thickly and cut the slices into strips.
Pile the turnip strips in a salad bowl and pour a little salad dressing over the turnips.
Garnish with sliced beetroot.

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.

Turnip + beetroottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together336 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold boiled turnips: Form the main body of the salad, providing the bulk and mild, slightly firm texture.
Salad dressing: Adds moisture and flavour, coating the turnip strips so they taste seasoned rather than plain.

“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.