Skip to main content
Main

Salsify, Boiled, Plain

Boiled salsify served plain, finished with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,227 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Salsify, Boiled, Plain

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scrape the salsify roots lightly and cut them into three-inch lengths or leave them whole.

  2. Soak the salsify in water with lemon juice until ready to cook.

Cook and serve

  1. Bring a pot of salted water to a boil and add the salsify.

  2. Boil until tender, about one hour.

  3. Drain the salsify and arrange it on toast on a hot dish.

  4. Pour melted butter over the salsify before serving.

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. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Salsify roots
Provide the main body of the dish, cooking to a tender texture as they boil.
Good melted butter
Adds richness and a smooth fat coating that carries flavour over the cooked salsify.

The step that matters

Boil until tender, about one hour. Salsify must be cooked fully through to become soft and sweet; underdone roots stay fibrous and starchy. Test for tenderness with a knife rather than relying on time alone, since root size and age vary.

“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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes