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Boiled Turnips with White Sauce

Boiled turnips served with a butter-based white sauce and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,842 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Turnips with White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and slice the turnips.

  2. Parboil the turnips for five minutes and drain them.

Cook and finish

  1. In a saucepan, melt a piece of butter and add the turnips.

  2. Toss the turnips over the fire for a few minutes.

  3. Add a few spoonfuls of Allemande sauce and mix well.

  4. Before serving, sprinkle finely chopped parsley over the turnips.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Turnip + saucetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together943 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Sauce + parsleytop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,693 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

White turnips
Provide the main vegetable, becoming tender through parboiling and gentle sautéing.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the turnips brown lightly and carry flavour.
Allemande sauce
Adds a creamy, savoury coating that moistens the turnips and binds them together.

The step that matters

Parboil the turnips for five minutes and drain them. Parboiling softens the dense root so it cooks through evenly later. Draining well matters because excess water would dilute the butter and sauce and stop the turnips from tossing and coating properly.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sauce, parsley. 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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