Name: Sea Kale
Ingredients: sea kale; salt; lemon juice; butter

Why it works: Kale and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 226 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Sea Kale

Ingredients

sea kale
salt
lemon juice
butter

Directions

Prepare

Wash the sea kale in several waters and remove the roots.

Cook

Tie the sea kale in bundles and place in boiling salted water with a squeeze of lemon juice.
Cook until tender, about 30 minutes.

Serve

Serve on toast with melted butter or a suitable sauce poured over.

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.

Kale + lemontop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together226 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,227 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Kale + buttertop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together247 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

Sea kale: Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender when simmered in water.
Butter: Adds richness and moisture when melted over the cooked sea kale.
Lemon juice: Adds a bright acidity that balances the mild, slightly bitter flavour of the greens.