Name: Sweet Pepper Butter
Ingredients: 4 Spanish sweet peppers; ½ ounce good butter

Why it works: Pepper and butter 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 ↓

Sweet Pepper Butter

Ingredients

4 Spanish sweet peppers
½ ounce good butter

Directions

Make the butter

Pound the sweet peppers to a pulp.
Press the pulp through a sieve.
Mix in the butter.

Serve

Serve with broiled fish.

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.

Pepper + buttertop 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

Spanish sweet peppers: Provide the main flavor and bulk, becoming a smooth pulp that gives the butter its color and taste.
Butter: Adds richness and a smooth, spreadable fat that carries the pepper flavor.

“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.