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Turnips with Brown Sauce

Turnips cooked in a brown sauce made from clear soup, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Turnips with Brown Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turnips

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

  2. Put the turnips in a saucepan, cover with boiling water, and simmer for about 30 minutes until half cooked.

  3. Drain the turnips and place them in a skillet with 2 tablespoons of butter; fry until golden brown.

Make the brown sauce

  1. Heat the clear soup and pour it over the turnips; simmer for 5 minutes.

  2. While simmering, mix 1 teaspoon of flour with 2 teaspoons of butter and stir this mixture into the soup.

  3. When the soup thickens to a custard-like consistency, pour it into a heated dish with a cover 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. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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, when browned in butter, add a caramelised, savoury flavour.
Butter
Browns the turnips in the skillet and enriches the sauce with fat and flavour.
Flour
Thickens the soup into a smooth, custard-like sauce when cooked with butter and liquid.
Clear soup
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, carrying flavour and becoming thick when simmered.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce. Flour mixed with butter and stirred into hot soup must be blended smoothly and simmered so the starch swells and thickens evenly. Adding it unevenly or without enough heat can leave lumps or a thin, raw-tasting sauce.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Turnipthe original

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