Name: Nasturtium Sauce
Ingredients: 1 cup drawn butter; 3 tablespoons pickled nasturtiums; ¼ teaspoon salt; ¼ teaspoon pepper

Why it works: Butter and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Nasturtium Sauce

Ingredients

1 cup drawn butter
3 tablespoons pickled nasturtiums
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon pepper

Directions

In a saucepan, stir together the drawn butter and pickled nasturtiums.
Add salt and pepper to taste.
Simmer gently over low heat until warmed through.
Serve immediately.

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.

Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Drawn butter: Provides fat and rich flavour, forming the body of the sauce.
Pickled nasturtiums: Add a tangy, acidic bite that cuts through the richness of the butter.

“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.