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Young Turnips Stewed with Cream

A stew of young turnips cooked in cream or milk, thickened with a white roux.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,874 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Young Turnips Stewed with Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turnips

  1. Pare the young turnips and soak them in cold water for one hour.

  2. Cook the turnips in two changes of water until tender.

Make the creamed sauce

  1. Drain the turnips and cover them with hot cream (or hot milk if cream is unavailable).

  2. Simmer gently for five minutes.

  3. Stir in a white roux made by cooking together the butter and flour, then season with salt and pepper.

Serve

  1. Serve very hot.

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 + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Young turnips
Provide the main vegetable, which softens during cooking and absorbs the cream sauce.
Hot cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture to the turnips.
Butter
Forms the fat base of the roux, adding richness and body to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter into a roux.

The step that matters

Stir in the roux before simmering. Flour must be cooked with butter so its starch thickens the cream evenly without lumps or a raw floury taste. Adding it cold or unevenly can leave clumps that are hard to smooth out.

Swap the turnip

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, butter, flour, 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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