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Roast Spare Rib

Roast spare rib with a butter‑flour sauce, egg, and capers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Summer savory and capers share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Roast Spare Rib

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the rib

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Season the spare rib with coarse sea salt, black pepper, and summer savory.

Roast and make the sauce

  1. Roast the spare rib in the oven until thoroughly well done.

  2. In a saucepan, melt the butter and mix in the flour until smooth. Gradually pour in boiling water until the sauce thickens.

  3. Stir in the chopped hard boiled egg and capers.

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. Summer savory + caperstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Summer savory + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together263 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + summer savorytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together671 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Spare rib
Provides the main protein, which becomes tender and browned through roasting.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the sauce base, carrying flavor.
Flour
Thickens the butter into a roux that gives the sauce body.
Hard boiled egg
Adds soft texture and mild richness to the finished sauce.
Capers
Add acidity and a salty, sharp bite that cuts the richness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour into the butter before adding water. Cooking the butter and flour together forms a roux that thickens smoothly. Adding the water gradually, while stirring, keeps lumps from forming as starch swells and the sauce thickens.

Swap the capers

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, summer savory, butter, flour, egg):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, summer savory, butter, flour, egg. 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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