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Summer Squash with Melted Butter

A simple dish of boiled summer squash served on toast with melted butter, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Summer Squash with Melted Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and boil

  1. Peel and cut the summer squashes in half, then into eighths.

  2. Boil the squash in salted water for 20 minutes.

Serve

  1. Drain the squash and arrange it neatly on a dish of toast.

  2. Dust with salt and pepper, and serve with a tureen of English drawn 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. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 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

Summer squash
Main vegetable; boiling softens its flesh until it is tender to eat.
English drawn butter
Melted butter adds richness and fat that carries flavour alongside the squash.

The step that matters

Boil the squash for 20 minutes. Squash releases water and turns mushy when overcooked, so timing the boil carefully keeps its texture firm enough to arrange neatly.

“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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