Skip to main content
Main

Directions for Cooking Asparagus

A boiled asparagus dish seasoned with salt and served with melted butter or cream.

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

Why it works: Asparagus and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,026 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Directions for Cooking Asparagus

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the asparagus buds when they are 3 to 6 inches high.

  2. Clean them well in cold water, cutting off most of the white part.

Cook

  1. Fill a pot with enough water to cover the stalks and add salt to season.

  2. Boil the water and skim off any foam.

  3. Add the asparagus and cook until tender, then remove immediately to preserve flavor and color.

Serve

  1. Serve with melted butter or cream.

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. Asparagus + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,026 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

Asparagus
Is the main vegetable, cooked until tender while keeping its flavor and bright color.
Melted butter or cream
Adds richness and fat that complements the mild, tender asparagus.

The step that matters

Remove the asparagus immediately when tender. Asparagus continues to cook from residual heat, so leaving it in the water can make it soft and dull in color. Removing it promptly preserves its texture, flavor and green color.

“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.

More boiled asparagus recipes

on Toast 6with Toast 5 See all 76 →

You might also like

Asparagus SoupAsparagus Soup179 recipesAsparagus SaladAsparagus Salad77 recipesCream of AsparagusCream of Asparagus38 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes