Name: Swiss Chard
Ingredients: Swiss chard leaves; butter; coarse sea salt

Why it works: Chard and butter work together. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Swiss Chard

Ingredients

Swiss chard leaves
butter
coarse sea salt

Directions

Cover the Swiss chard leaves and cook for 10 minutes.
Mince the cooked leaves.
Add small pieces of butter and coarse sea salt to taste.
Alternatively, cream the leaves.

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.

Chard + buttertop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together122 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

Swiss chard leaves: Form the body of the dish; cooking softens them into a tender texture.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, giving the cooked leaves a smooth, silky mouthfeel.

“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.