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Salsify or Vegetable Oyster

A boiled salsify dish flavored with milk, butter, salt, pepper, and rolled crackers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Salsify or Vegetable Oyster

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash, scrape, and slice the salsify thinly.

Cook and finish

  1. Cook the salsify in enough water to cover it until tender.

  2. Add milk, butter, coarse sea salt, pepper, and rolled crackers to the cooked salsify.

  3. Stir well and serve.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Milk + peppertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together26,984 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

What each ingredient does

Salsify
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender when simmered.
Milk
Adds moisture and creaminess to the cooked salsify.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving a smoother mouthfeel.
Rolled crackers
Thicken the liquid and add body as they absorb moisture.

“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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