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Colbert Butter

A butter flavored with tarragon and colored green using spinach juice, served with fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Tarragon and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 112 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Colbert Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the butter

  1. Combine 1 pound of Maltre d'Hotel butter, 6 tablespoons of dissolved pale meat glaze, and 1 teaspoon of chopped tarragon in a bowl, then mix well.

  2. Serve with fish prepared à la Colbert.

Extract the green colour

  1. Wash and shake 2 pounds of spinach to remove water.

  2. Pound the spinach raw.

  3. Press it in a strong towel to extract the green juice.

  4. Pour the juice into a saucepan.

  5. Let it coagulate in a bain-marie.

  6. Drain the water by pouring the coagulated juice onto a cloth stretched over a bowl.

  7. Collect the coloring substance using a palette knife.

Finish the butter

  1. Mix it with half its weight in butter.

  2. Strain the mixture through a sieve.

  3. Set aside to cool.

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. Tarragon + spinachtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together112 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + meattop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Butter + tarragontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,572 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  4. Meat + spinachtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together263 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Butter + spinachtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,583 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Maltre d'hotel butter
Provides the fat base that carries the flavour and gives the butter its rich, smooth texture.
Pale meat glaze
Adds savoury depth and body to the butter once dissolved into it.
Spinach
Supplies the green colouring and juice that tint the finished butter.
Tarragon
Adds a fresh, aromatic herbal note to the butter.

The step that matters

Coagulating the spinach juice in the bain-marie. The juice's proteins set with gentle, even heat. If it gets too hot, it turns dull and grainy, and the colour and smoothness suffer.

Swap the tarragon

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Tarragonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, meat, spinach. 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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