Name: Boiled Summer Squash, or Cymling
Ingredients: 2 medium summer squash (cymling); ½ teaspoon coarse sea salt; 2 tablespoons butter; ¼ teaspoon black 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 ↓

Boiled Summer Squash, or Cymling

Ingredients

2 medium summer squash (cymling)
½ teaspoon coarse sea salt
2 tablespoons butter
¼ teaspoon black pepper

Directions

Prepare

Wash the squash.
Cut it into pieces, removing the seeds.
If the rind is hard, peel it thinly.
Soak the squash in cold water for 15-20 minutes.

Cook and serve

Boil a pot of salted water and add the squash.
Cover and cook until tender.
Drain the squash thoroughly.
Mash it through a colander.
Season with butter, 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

Summer squash: Forms the main body of the dish, softening into a tender, mashable flesh when boiled.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, giving the mashed squash a smooth, silky mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Drain the squash thoroughly. Excess water left in the squash dilutes the seasoning and makes the mash loose and watery, so draining well keeps the texture thick and the flavour concentrated.

“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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Boiled Summer Squash, or Cymling