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Asparagus Tips in Pattie Cases

A dish of boiled asparagus tips mixed with a white sauce, then filled into pattie cases and served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Asparagus Tips in Pattie Cases

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the asparagus

  1. Cut fresh asparagus into 1‑inch pieces down the stalk as far as tender.

  2. Boil the asparagus in plenty of rapidly boiling water until tender, then drain and save the water for soup.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In a saucepan, make a white sauce by combining milk, cream, butter, flour, salt, and pepper.

  2. Add the asparagus to the sauce and mix carefully to avoid breaking the pieces.

  3. Heat the pattie cases, fill them with the asparagus mixture, and serve on a hot plate with a doily.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Asparagus + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,968 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Asparagus + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together936 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

Butter
Melts with flour to form the roux that thickens the white sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk and cream into a white sauce by gelatinising its starch.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the white sauce, giving it body and a mild flavour.
Cream
Adds richness and fat to the white sauce, making it smoother and silkier.

The step that matters

Add the asparagus to the sauce and mix carefully. Tender asparagus pieces break easily under stirring. Gentle folding keeps them intact, so the filling keeps its texture rather than turning mushy and uneven.

Swap the asparagus

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Spinachfits about as well
  4. Asparagusthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cream, 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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