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Turnips in White Sauce

Turnips cooked in salted water, served with white sauce, optionally sweetened with sugar or flavored with mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 290 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Turnips in White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and cut the turnips into pear or marble shapes.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the turnips in salted water with a little butter until tender.

  2. Drain the turnips and arrange them on a dish.

  3. Pour the white sauce over the turnips and add a small lump of sugar if desired.

  4. For extra flavor, add a little mustard to the sauce 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 + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sauce + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,120 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Sauce + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Turnips
Form the main body of the dish, becoming soft and mild when boiled until tender.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded flavor to the boiled turnips.
White sauce
Adds creamy moisture and coats the turnips, giving the dish its main texture.

The step that matters

Boil the turnips until tender. Turnips need to be cooked through so they are soft and mild; undercooked pieces stay firm and taste harsh. Cutting them to even sizes helps them cook at the same rate.

Swap the mustard

The recipe marks mustard as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, butter, sauce, white pepper, sugar):

  1. Leekfits about as well
  2. Horseradishfits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, butter, sauce, white pepper, sugar. 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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