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Asparagus, Sauce Hollandaise

A dish of boiled asparagus topped with Hollandaise sauce, served on toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Asparagus and sauce work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 573 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Asparagus, Sauce Hollandaise

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the asparagus

  1. Boil asparagus in water with washing soda and salt until tender.

Assemble and serve

  1. Place toast on a dish and arrange asparagus on top, with heads in the dish.

  2. Pour Hollandaise sauce over the asparagus heads.

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. Asparagus + saucetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together573 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Asparagus
The main vegetable, providing the tender stalks and delicate heads that form the dish.
Common washing soda
Raises the water's alkalinity, which helps asparagus soften faster and keep a brighter green color.
Toast
Provides a firm base that holds the asparagus and soaks up some of the sauce.
Hollandaise sauce
An emulsion of egg yolk and butter that adds richness, fat, and a tangy flavor.

The step that matters

Boil the asparagus until tender. Asparagus cooks quickly. Stalks need enough heat to soften, but overcooking turns the heads mushy and dulls their green color.

“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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