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Creamed Parsnips

A dish of boiled parsnips coated in a butter and flour 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 the parsnips.

  2. Scrape the parsnips.

  3. Slice the parsnips crosswise.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Heat the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the parsnips and shake until they are coated and very hot.

  3. Transfer the parsnips to a deep dish.

  4. Add the flour to the remaining butter and thin it with hot cream.

  5. Boil the sauce once.

  6. Pour the sauce over the parsnips.

  7. 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. Butter + parsniptop 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

Butter
Enriches the parsnips with fat and carries flavour, and forms the base of the sauce.
Parsnips
Provide the main body and sweet, earthy flavour of the dish.
Flour
Thickens the butter and cream into a smooth sauce that clings to the parsnips.
Cream
Thins the flour-butter base into a rich, pourable sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce once. Flour thickens cream only when heated enough for its starch to swell. Boiling once thickens the sauce fully, while boiling longer can break the emulsion and make it grainy or thin.

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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