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Sauce

Nasturtium Sauce

A butter sauce flavored with pickled nasturtiums, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Nasturtium Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, stir together the drawn butter and pickled nasturtiums.

  2. Add salt and pepper to taste.

  3. Simmer gently over low heat until warmed through.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately.

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. 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

Drawn butter
Provides the fat and rich body that carries the flavour of the sauce.
Pickled nasturtiums
Adds sharp, acidic, tangy flavour that cuts through the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Simmer gently over low heat. Butter is an emulsion of fat and water with milk solids. High heat can scorch the milk solids and cause the fat to separate, so gentle warming keeps the sauce smooth and fully combined.

“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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