Skip to main content
Main

Turnips a LA Poulette

A French-style turnip dish cooked with butter, flour, water, onions, herbs, and finished with egg yolk and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Turnips a LA Poulette

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Mix in the flour until well combined.

  3. Add the water and stir until smooth.

  4. Add the onions, bouquet garni, salt, and pepper.

Cook and finish

  1. Add the washed and dried turnips, quartering large ones and halving small ones.

  2. Cook until the turnips are tender.

  3. Remove the herbs, then stir in the egg yolk and cream.

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. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + turniptop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour while the flour is cooked into a roux.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce as it cooks with the butter and water.
Turnips
Form the main body of the dish and become tender as they simmer in the sauce.
Egg yolk
Enriches and thickens the sauce to a creamy texture when stirred in at the end.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolk and cream. Egg yolk thickens when heated gently but can scramble if the sauce is boiling. Stir it in off the heat or over low heat so the sauce stays smooth and creamy.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, onion, pepper, egg, cream):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, onion, pepper, egg, cream. 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.

You might also like

Turnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes