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Stewed Salsify

A stew of salsify roots simmered in milk with butter, flour, and black pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Stewed Salsify

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scrape and cut each salsify root in half, dropping them into water as you scrape.

Stew and finish

  1. Stew the roots in boiling water with a little coarse sea salt until tender.

  2. Pour off the water and add enough milk to cover the roots.

  3. When the milk boils, stir in a piece of butter rolled in flour, along with black pepper and salt.

  4. Simmer for five minutes, then pour out.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Salsify roots
Provide the main body of the dish, becoming tender through stewing.
Milk
Forms the liquid that cooks down into a creamy, moist sauce around the roots.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor and smoothing the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk as it heats, giving the sauce body.

The step that matters

Stirring in the butter and flour. Flour rolled into butter and added to boiling milk must be stirred in well, or it clumps. Once it is dispersed, the starch thickens the liquid as it heats, forming a smooth sauce.

“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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