Name: Hawaiian Leeks
Ingredients: leeks; coarse sea salt; butter or cream sauce

Why it works: Leek and butter work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 848 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Hawaiian Leeks

Ingredients

leeks
coarse sea salt
butter or cream sauce

Directions

Prepare

Wash the leeks and remove the outer skin from the leaves.
Cut off the root and some of the green parts.
Tie the leeks with a piece of cheesecloth.

Cook and serve

Boil in salted water for 45 minutes.
Serve hot with butter or cream sauce poured over the white ends.

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.

Leek + buttertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together848 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Leeks: Are the main vegetable; they soften as they cook and become tender and mild.
Butter or cream sauce: Adds richness and fat, giving the mild leeks a silky, savoury coating when served.

“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.