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To Boil Asparagus

A boiled asparagus dish served with toast and melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Boil Asparagus

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fill a pot with plenty of water and add a handful of coarse sea salt.

  2. Scrape the asparagus stalks until they are white and cut them to 2–3 inches below the green part.

  3. Soak the scraped asparagus in cold water.

  4. Tie the asparagus in small bundles with bast or tape.

Boil and serve

  1. Once the water is boiling, add the asparagus and boil for 60–75 minutes depending on age.

  2. Toast a large slice of bread, cut off the crust, and dip it in the asparagus water.

  3. Drain the asparagus and place it on the toast with the heads pointing inward and the stalks outward.

  4. Serve with melted butter.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Asparagus + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together363 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Asparagus + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,026 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Asparagus
Is the main vegetable, cooked until very tender throughout its stalks.
Bread
Soaks up the asparagus water, giving a moist, flavoured base under the spears.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour when melted over the cooked asparagus.

The step that matters

Boiling time for the asparagus. Stalks cooked too briefly stay fibrous and woody, while the long simmer breaks down cell walls so the spears turn tender. Judging the time by the asparagus's age matters because older, thicker stalks need longer to soften evenly.

Swap the asparagus

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter):

  1. Leekfits about as well
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Asparagusthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter. 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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