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Young Turnips

Stewed young turnips cooked with milk, butter, flour, salt, pepper, and a pinch of baking soda.

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

Young Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turnips

  1. Peel and quarter the turnips.

  2. Boil in salted water for 15 minutes until tender.

  3. Drain and cover with heated milk and a tiny bit of baking soda.

Stew and serve

  1. Stir in butter rolled in flour, and season with pepper and salt.

  2. Simmer gently for 15 more minutes.

  3. Serve in a deep, covered dish, very hot.

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

Young turnips
Provide the main vegetable, which becomes tender through boiling and then stewing.
Milk
Forms a creamy, moist sauce that coats the turnips during stewing.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded flavour.
Flour
Thickens the milk sauce when rolled with butter and stirred in.
Baking soda (in the method)
Raises the pH slightly, which can soften the turnips further.

The step that matters

Stirring in the butter and flour. Adding the flour-butter mixture to hot liquid without stirring can leave lumps, because flour clumps when it meets heat unevenly. Stirring steadily while it simmers lets the starch disperse and thicken the sauce smoothly.

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.

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