Name: Poke Stalks
Ingredients: young poke stalks; coarse sea salt; butter; 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 ↓

Poke Stalks

Ingredients

young poke stalks
coarse sea salt
butter
pepper

Directions

Prepare

Gather young poke stalks, no larger than a man's little finger, with a tuft of leaves at the top.
Scrape the stalks without cutting off the leaves.
Soak the stalks in cold water with a little coarse sea salt for 2 hours.
Tie the stalks in bundles like asparagus.

Cook and serve

Boil the bundles in water for 45 minutes.
Place buttered toast in a dish.
Untie the bundles.
Pile the poke on top.
Butter the poke generously.
Sprinkle the poke with pepper and salt.

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

Young poke stalks: Provide the tender vegetable that is the main component of the dish.
Butter: Adds richness and moisture, and coats the hot stalks and toast with flavour.

“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.