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Printanier Butter

A butter mixture flavored with consommé, sugar, and sea salt, used for spring vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and asparagus match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 292 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Printanier Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Cook the vegetables quickly in boiling salted water until tender.

  2. Drain and dry the vegetables, then pound them with an equal weight of butter.

  3. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve or tammy.

Make the carrot version

  1. For carrots, mince and cook with consommé, sugar, and butter until reduced.

  2. Pound the cooked carrots with their own weight of butter and rub through a 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. Beans + asparagustop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together292 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Peas + asparagustop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together808 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Carrot + beanstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Beans + peastop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together949 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Carrot + asparagustop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together571 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Carries the vegetable flavour and gives the finished butter its smooth, spreadable texture.
Early-season vegetables
Provide the main flavour and colour of the butter.
Consomme
Adds savoury depth and moisture when cooking the carrots.
Sugar
Adds a touch of sweetness that balances the savoury flavours in the carrot version.

The step that matters

Drain and dry the vegetables before pounding. Excess water left on the vegetables dilutes the butter and can make the finished mixture loose and less stable, so the vegetables should be thoroughly dried first.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, peas, asparagus, butter, sugar):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Cauliflowerfits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, peas, asparagus, butter, sugar. 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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