Name: Turnips Baked with Mutton
Ingredients: turnips; leg of mutton

Why it works: Turnip and mutton are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,558 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Turnips Baked with Mutton

Ingredients

turnips
leg of mutton

Directions

Prepare

Boil the turnips until almost tender, cutting large ones into quarters.
Drain the turnips and place them in a pan with a roasting leg of mutton.

Bake and serve

Bake for about 45 minutes, basting frequently.
Serve the turnips around the mutton once they are well browned and very tender.

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 + muttontop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,558 recipes

Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Turnips: Absorb meat juices and brown on the surface, becoming tender and sweet as they cook.
Leg of mutton: Provides the main meat and fat that drips into the pan, flavouring and moistening the turnips as they bake.

“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.