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Sauce

Shallot Butter

A butter sauce made by mincing shallots and mixing with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,426 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Shallot Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the shallots

  1. Place roughly minced shallots in a clean towel and wash them quickly in boiling water.

  2. Cool the shallots and press them heavily to remove excess water.

Make the butter

  1. Pound the shallots finely with an equal weight of fresh butter.

  2. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve or tammy.

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. Shallot + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Shallots
Provide the aromatic, mildly sweet onion flavour that defines the butter.
Fresh butter
Carries the shallot flavour and gives the finished butter its rich, smooth texture.

The step that matters

Pressing the shallots dry. Any water left in the shallots stays in the butter, making it wetter and less stable, so it spoils sooner and does not blend smoothly. Pressing firmly removes that water before the shallots are pounded into the butter.

“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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