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Asparagus Roll

A French roll filled with a sauce of butter, flour, milk, egg, lemon juice and boiled asparagus tips.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Asparagus and lemon work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 704 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Asparagus Roll

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour until well combined.

  3. Add the well-beaten egg, then the milk and asparagus water.

  4. Bring the mixture to a boil, then add the lemon juice.

Cook the asparagus

  1. Boil asparagus tips in salted water for about 30 minutes.

  2. Add the cooked asparagus tips to the sauce and season to taste.

Assemble and serve

  1. Fill buttered and toasted French rolls with the asparagus mixture and serve hot.

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. Asparagus + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together704 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + asparagustop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together936 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Thickens the butter and milk mixture into a smooth, creamy sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavor, and forms the base of the roux with the flour.
Egg
Enriches the sauce and helps give it body as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, giving it a creamy texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Bringing the sauce to a boil after adding the egg. The egg can curdle or scramble if the mixture gets too hot too fast. Adding the egg to the liquid gradually and stirring constantly keeps the sauce smooth, while bringing it to a boil thickens it fully.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, milk, asparagus, egg):

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Raisinfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, milk, asparagus, 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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