Name: To Boil Asparagus
Ingredients: Asparagus; Butter; Coarse sea salt; Drawn butter

Why it works: Asparagus and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,026 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Boil Asparagus

Ingredients

Asparagus
Butter
Coarse sea salt
Drawn butter

Directions

Prepare

Peel the tough skin off the white part of the asparagus.
Tie the asparagus into small bunches.

Cook and serve

Boil the asparagus in water for 20 minutes.
Serve the asparagus on slices of buttered toast.
Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and drizzle with 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.

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: Forms the main body of the dish, cooking to a tender texture as it boils.
Butter: Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel, both on the toast and as drawn butter.

“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.