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Turnips in White Sauce

Turnips cooked in veal broth and served with a thick white sauce of cream and arrowroot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and arrowroot share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Turnips in White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turnips

  1. Cut turnips into quarters and shape them into balls or plums of equal size.

  2. Arrange turnips in a broad saucepan and cover with veal-broth.

  3. Add a little coarse sea salt and sugar, then boil until tender but unbroken.

  4. Lift turnips out and drain well from the broth.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. To make the sauce, add cream and arrowroot to the broth and bring to a boil.

  2. Stir in butter until the sauce is rich enough.

  3. Pour the thick white sauce over the turnips before serving.

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 + arrowroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + arrowroottop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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 tender while holding their shape when boiled.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy body to the white sauce.
Arrowroot
Thickens the broth into a glossy sauce without making it cloudy.
Veal-broth
Cooks the turnips and forms the flavorful base of the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and a silky finish to the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the turnips until tender but unbroken. Turnips turn soft and fall apart if boiled too hard or too long, so they should be cooked gently until just tender, keeping their shape.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, sugar, cream, arrowroot, butter):

  1. Shallotfits about as well
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Beetrootfits about as well
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, sugar, cream, arrowroot, 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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