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Kale, Scotch

A boiled kale dish seasoned with butter, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Kale and pepper work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 492 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Kale, Scotch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the Scotch kale very carefully.

  2. Bring a pot of salted water to a fast boil.

Cook and serve

  1. Add the kale to the boiling water and leave the saucepan uncovered.

  2. Boil the kale for about 20 minutes until tender.

  3. Serve with butter, pepper, and salt.

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. Kale + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together492 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. 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

Scotch kale
Is the main vegetable, becoming tender as it boils in water.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the cooked kale.

Swap the kale

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Kalethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper. 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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