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To Boil Turnips

Turnips boiled with sugar, sweet dripping, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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To Boil Turnips

Why it works: Turnip and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,252 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

To Boil Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the turnips.

  2. Peel off nearly half an inch.

  3. Cut them into halves or quarters, depending on their size.

Boil

  1. Put them in plenty of cold water with the sugar.

  2. Boil steadily for 30 minutes.

  3. Check for tenderness with a skewer.

  4. Remove them with a slotted spoon into a colander to drain.

Mash and season

  1. If mashing, squeeze them dry between two plates.

  2. Return them to the saucepan and mash with a wooden spoon.

  3. Stir in the sweet dripping and season with pepper and salt to taste.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,330 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + peppertop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,401 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,401 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

Turnips
Form the main body of the dish, becoming soft and mashable when boiled until tender.
Sweet dripping
Adds richness and fat, giving the mashed turnips a smoother, moister texture and savoury flavour.
Sugar
Adds a little sweetness to the boiling water, mildly offsetting the turnips' bitter edge.

The step that matters

Squeezing the turnips dry before mashing. Turnips hold a lot of water. If they are mashed while wet, the mash turns loose and watery. Squeezing them dry between plates concentrates their texture so the dripping can be absorbed into a thick, fluffy purée.

Swap the turnip

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, pepper. 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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