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Dessert

Pistachio Butter

A spread made by boiling pistachios, removing skins, pounding them, 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: Pistachio and butter work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 587 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Pistachio Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pistachios

  1. Boil the pistachios in water until the peel can be easily removed.

  2. Drain and cool the pistachios in cold water.

  3. Clean the pistachios and finely pound them while moistening with water.

Make the butter

  1. Add the butter and pass the mixture through a fine sieve.

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. Pistachio + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together587 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Pistachios
Provide the main flavour and the oils that give the butter its smooth, spreadable body.
Butter
Adds extra fat and richness, helping the pounded nuts become smooth and spreadable.

The step that matters

Pounding while moistening with water. Nuts release oil slowly when crushed, and adding water helps keep the paste from heating and turning greasy or grainy, which is why the pounding should be fine and steady.

“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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