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To Boil Asparagus

A boiled asparagus dish served on toasted bread with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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. Scrape the stems of the asparagus lightly, leaving two inches at the points.

  2. Soak the asparagus in cold water for a few minutes.

  3. Tie the asparagus in equal-sized bunches and trim the ends to make them the same length.

Cook

  1. Boil salted water and add the asparagus; cook for 20–25 minutes until tender.

  2. Toast a round of bread and quickly dip it into the boiling asparagus water.

Serve

  1. Place the asparagus on the toasted bread with the points meeting in the center.

  2. Serve with rich 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 tender in boiling salted water.
Bread
Forms a toasted base that soaks up flavor and moisture from the asparagus water.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that coats the asparagus and toast.

The step that matters

Cook the asparagus until tender. Asparagus turns from crisp to soft within a narrow window. Cooking too briefly leaves stems fibrous and raw-tasting, while overcooking makes them limp and dull in color. Checking tenderness near the stated time helps get the texture right.

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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