Why it works: Butternut and olive work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and 35 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓
The recipe
Ingredients
Contains: egg, milk, wheat, tree nuts (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)
Directions
Prepare the dough
Set aside 1 ounce flour with the yolk of one egg, 3 ounces grated cheese with 1 butter the size of an egg, and 1 teaspoonful salt with a pinch of cayenne.
Mix flour, cayenne, cheese and salt together, and moisten with the egg.
Mix all to a smooth paste.
Shape and bake
Roll out on a board and cut into strips an eighth of an inch wide, five inches long, and an eighth of an inch thick.
Put the straws through rings which must be an eighth of an inch wide.
Place these on sheets or pans in an oven (2400 F.) and bake until brown.
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. See the original page.
Explore the science
The flavor team
The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.
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Butternut + olivetop 9% of all pairsAroma overlapmoderateMentioned together35 recipes
Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
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Cheese + buttertop 3% of all pairsAroma overlapstrongMentioned together7,955 recipes
Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
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Almond + olivetop 4% of all pairsAroma overlapstrongMentioned together1,586 recipes
Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
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Cheese + olivetop 5% of all pairsAroma overlapstrongMentioned together3,530 recipes
Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (apple, fatty).
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Butter + almondtop 5% of all pairsAroma overlapstrongMentioned together9,198 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Flour (in the method)
- Provides the structure that holds the dough together and gives the straws their body.
- Grated cheese
- Adds savoury flavour and fat, and helps the dough bind into a paste.
- Butter
- Adds fat that makes the dough rich and tender rather than tough.
- Egg yolk
- Binds the dough and adds richness, helping it hold its shape when rolled.
The step that matters
Bake until brown. Browning comes from heat acting on the dough's proteins and sugars, so the straws need watching. Too little time leaves them pale and doughy, while too much makes them bitter and dry.
Flavor stand-ins for the butternut
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cheese, butter, almond, sugar, molasses, meat, cider):
- Walnutbetter flavor fit
- Beansbetter flavor fit
- Pecansbetter flavor fit
- Butternutthe original
Fit is the average pairing score against cheese, butter, almond, sugar, molasses, meat, cider. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).
“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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