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Brittany Butter

A butter flavored with finely chopped watercress, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Watercress and pepper work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 983 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Brittany Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the leaves

  1. Pick the green and fresh leaves from the stalks of the watercress.

  2. Chop the leaves finely and dry them in a cloth.

  3. Mince the dried leaves again.

Make the butter

  1. Knead the minced leaves into the softened butter until it is bright green.

  2. Season 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.

  1. Watercress + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Watercress + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together842 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Watercress leaves
Gives the butter its peppery flavour and bright green colour.
Butter
Provides fat that carries flavour and gives the spread a smooth, rich texture.

The step that matters

Drying the chopped leaves. Water left on the leaves would mix into the butter, making it watery and less stable. Drying them well keeps the butter firm 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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