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Asparagus with Cream Sauce

A dish of boiled asparagus served with a cream sauce thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Asparagus and flour work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 936 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Asparagus with Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the asparagus

  1. Soak the asparagus in cold water for 1 hour before boiling.

  2. Tie the asparagus in small bunches with soft tape and boil in salted water until tender, about 30 minutes.

  3. Drain the asparagus and untie the bunches, placing the stalks on a hot plate.

Make the cream sauce

  1. In a saucepan, heat the cream until just boiling, then stir in salt and flour mixed with a little cream.

  2. Boil until the flour is cooked, then strain the sauce through a fine wire strainer and serve over the asparagus.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  3. Asparagus + creamtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together838 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Asparagus
Forms the main body of the dish and is cooked until tender in salted water.
Thin sweet cream
Forms the sauce base, giving it a smooth, rich, pourable texture.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the cream as it boils, so the sauce becomes smooth and coats the asparagus.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce until the flour is cooked. Raw flour tastes pasty and will not thicken fully. Boiling the flour-and-cream mixture long enough gelatinises the starch, giving a smooth sauce with no floury taste.

Swap the asparagus

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Asparagusthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, flour. 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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