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Dessert

Montpelier Butter

A butter made by mixing minced watercress with fresh butter, salt, and pepper, shaped into balls for serving with cheese.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Watercress and pepper work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 983 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Montpelier Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the watercress

  1. Pick the leaves of a quantity of watercress.

  2. Mince the leaves as finely as possible and dry them in a cloth.

  3. Mince them again and dry them once more.

Make the butter

  1. Knead the minced watercress with enough fresh butter to form a mixture.

  2. Add a small amount of salt and pepper.

Shape and serve

  1. Shape the mixture into balls and serve with the cheese course.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Watercress + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together842 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Watercress leaves
Gives the butter its peppery flavour and green colour.
Fresh butter
Provides the fat that binds the minced leaves into a spreadable mixture.

The step that matters

Drying the minced watercress. Leftover water in the leaves can separate out of the butter, making the mixture wet and diluting its flavour. Drying in a cloth after each mincing removes this moisture before the leaves are kneaded in.

“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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