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Cooking Salsify

A boiled salsify dish seasoned with vinegar, flour, salt, butter, lemon juice, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Cooking Salsify

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and scrape the salsify roots.

  2. Cut them into slices about 3 inches long.

  3. Mix vinegar, flour, salt, and water in a bowl.

  4. Drop the salsify slices into the mixture.

Cook and serve

  1. In a stew-pan, cook for 30 minutes from the time the water boils.

  2. Drain the salsify.

  3. Serve with white sauce or mix with butter, salt, lemon juice, and parsley.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Flour and butter 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

Salsify roots
Provide the main vegetable, which becomes tender and mild when boiled.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid slightly, helping coat the salsify.
Vinegar
Acidity helps keep the pale salsify slices from darkening during cooking.
Butter
Adds fat and richness when tossed with the cooked salsify.

The step that matters

Drop the slices into the vinegar and flour mixture promptly. Salsify discolours quickly once cut because its exposed flesh oxidises. Getting the slices into the acidic mixture right away limits browning and keeps the roots pale.

“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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