Name: Turnip Sauce
Ingredients: 4 turnips; water; béchamel sauce

Why it works: Turnip and sauce work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 943 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Turnip Sauce

Ingredients

4 turnips
water
béchamel sauce

Directions

Prepare the purée

Peel the turnips.
Sweat the turnips in a little water until tender and the liquid is reduced.
Pass the cooked turnips through a fine sieve.
Add a small quantity of béchamel sauce to the puréed turnips.

Shape and finish

Cut additional turnips into shapes similar to haricot beans.
Sweat the shaped turnips in the same manner.
Add the béchamel sauce to the shaped 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.

Turnip + saucetop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together943 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips: Provides the main bulk and the flavour of the sauce.
Béchamel sauce: Adds richness and a smooth, creamy body that binds the turnip.

The step that matters

Sweating the turnips until tender and reduced. Gentle covered cooking softens the turnip without browning it. Reducing the liquid keeps the flavour concentrated and stops the purée from becoming watery, which would weaken its texture and make it harder to sieve smooth.

“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.