Name: Asparagus Pie
Ingredients: cooked asparagus; white sauce; pie crust

Why it works: Asparagus and sauce work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 573 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Asparagus Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

cooked asparagus
white sauce
pie crust

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
Make a good pie crust and line a baking dish.

Assemble and bake

Fill the dish with cooked asparagus and dress it with white sauce.
Cover with a top crust.
Bake in the preheated oven until golden.

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.

Asparagus + saucetop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together573 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked asparagus: Forms the main filling and provides the vegetable body of the pie.
White sauce: Adds moisture and creaminess that binds the asparagus together.
Pie crust: Encloses the filling and provides structure, with browning from baking.

“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.