Skip to main content
Main

Turnips with White Sauce

Turnips simmered in a butter‑flour white sauce, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Turnips with White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turnips

  1. Peel the turnips, cut them into strips, then dice.

Cook

  1. Cover the turnips with hot water and cook until tender, about 1 hour.

  2. Drain the turnips and pour the boiled milk over them, then return to the heat.

Thicken and serve

  1. Rub the butter and flour together, then stir into the turnips until the milk thickens.

  2. Add salt and pepper to taste, and serve.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Turnips
Form the main body of the dish and soften into a tender vegetable base.
Sweet milk
Forms the creamy liquid that the sauce is built from.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the sauce, smoothing its flavour and mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a white sauce as it heats and coats the turnips.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter and flour into the milk. Flour needs to be fully rubbed into the butter and then stirred into hot liquid so it disperses evenly. If added in lumps it will not hydrate smoothly, leaving floury clumps instead of a silky sauce that thickens as the starch swells with heat.

Swap the turnip

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, 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.

More turnips with white sauce recipes

Boiled 3 See all 3 →

You might also like

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