Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Salsify or Oyster Plant

A boiled salsify dish served over buttered toast with cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Boiled Salsify or Oyster Plant

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and scrape the salsify roots, placing them in cold water to prevent discoloration.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the salsify in a kettle of boiling water for about 1 hour.

  2. Drain the salsify and arrange it neatly on a plate of buttered toast.

  3. Cover with Cream Sauce 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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Salsify roots
The main vegetable, which becomes tender through long boiling.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the buttered toast beneath the salsify.
Cream sauce
Adds moisture and richness over the cooked salsify.

The step that matters

Placing the scraped roots in cold water. Salsify discolors quickly once its skin is broken and its cut surfaces are exposed to air. Holding the roots in cold water slows this browning and keeps the pale color of the cooked vegetable.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes