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Preserve

Green Butter

A butter blended with spring onion, parsley, watercress, salt, cayenne pepper, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 469 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Green Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine the spring onion, parsley, watercress, salt, and cayenne pepper in a mortar or dish.

  2. Pound the mixture to a pulp.

  3. Add the butter and pound again until well mixed.

  4. Strain the mixture through a sieve.

Store

  1. Store in a cool place until ready to use.

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. Parsley + watercresstop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together469 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Onion + watercresstop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together533 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Provides fat and a creamy base that binds the herbs together.
Spring onion
Adds a mild, sharp onion aroma to the butter.
Parsley
Contributes fresh, green herbal flavour and colour.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, watercress, pepper, butter):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, watercress, pepper, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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