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Fried Summer Squash

Thin slices of summer squash are salted, floured, and sautéed in butter until crisp.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fried Summer Squash

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the squash

  1. Pare the squash and cut it into very thin slices.

  2. Sprinkle the slices with coarse sea salt and pile them on a plate.

  3. Cover with a weight to express the juice and let stand for one hour.

Cook

  1. Dredge the slices in flour.

  2. Sauté slowly in butter until crisp and brown.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Summer squash
Forms the main body of the dish; salting first draws out juice so the slices cook crisp rather than soggy.
All-purpose flour
Coats the slices, helping them brown and forming a crisp outer layer in the butter.
Butter
Fat for frying that browns the flour coating and adds rich flavor.

The step that matters

Pressing out the juice. Salting and weighting the slices draws out water. If they are not drained well, the moisture steams the squash and blocks browning, so the slices will be soft instead of crisp.

“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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