Name: Butter That Smells of Roses
Ingredients: butter; rose leaves; ice

Why it works: Butter and rose are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,922 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Butter That Smells of Roses

Ingredients

butter
rose leaves
ice

Directions

Prepare

Make small pats of butter.
Wrap each pat in fine muslin.

Infuse

Place the wrapped pats on a bed of rose leaves in an earthen jar.
Add another layer of fresh rose leaves on top.
Fill the jar with a solid chunk of ice.
Refrigerate for 10 hours before serving.

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 + rosetop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,922 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter: Carries the rose aroma, since fat absorbs fragrant compounds from the leaves around it.
Rose leaves: Supply the floral aroma that the butter picks up during chilling.

“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.