Name: Asparagus with Butter Sauce
Ingredients: 2 bunches of asparagus; 2 quarts of boiling water; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; white sauce or melted butter

Why it works: Asparagus and sauce work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 573 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Asparagus with Butter Sauce

Ingredients

2 bunches of asparagus
2 quarts of boiling water
¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt
white sauce or melted butter

Directions

Scrape and wash the asparagus, cutting it into equal lengths.
Boil the asparagus in boiling water with salt until tender.
Drain the asparagus and serve hot with white sauce or melted butter.

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.

Asparagus + saucetop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together573 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Asparagus: The main vegetable; boiling softens its fibrous stalks into a tender texture.
White sauce or melted butter: Adds fat and richness, coating the hot asparagus with flavour and moisture.

The step that matters

Boiling until tender. Asparagus cooks quickly. Overboiling breaks down its cell walls, leaving it soft and mushy, and dulls its bright green colour as chlorophyll breaks down. Check it often and drain as soon as the stalks are tender.

“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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Asparagus with Butter Sauce