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Creamed Parsnips

Creamed parsnips are boiled parsnips coated in butter and served with a flour‑thickened hot cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 669 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Creamed Parsnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the parsnips

  1. Boil, scrape, and slice the parsnips crosswise.

  2. Heat the butter in a saucepan.

  3. Add the parsnips and shake until they are coated with butter and very hot.

  4. Transfer the parsnips to a deep dish.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In the same saucepan, add the flour to the remaining butter and thin it with hot cream.

  2. Boil the sauce once, then pour it over the parsnips 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. Parsnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together669 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Parsnip + buttertop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,051 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-pinene (pine, resin).

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

Parsnips
Form the main body of the dish, giving its starchy, slightly sweet flavor and soft texture.
Butter
Coats the parsnips and carries flavor, adding richness and moisture to the dish.
Flour
Thickens the butter and cream into a smooth sauce that clings to the parsnips.
Cream
Thins the flour mixture into a rich, pourable sauce that adds fat and smoothness.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce once after adding the cream. Flour must be cooked after it is mixed with liquid so its starch swells and thickens the sauce and loses its raw, pasty taste. Boiling briefly sets the thickness; cream added too cold or stirred poorly can leave lumps.

Swap the parsnip

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Parsnipthe original

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