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To Boil Asparagus

Boiled asparagus served with buttered toast, vegetables, coarse sea salt, and drawn butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the tough skin off the white part of the asparagus and tie it in small bunches.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the asparagus in water for 20 minutes.

  2. Serve the asparagus on slices of vegetables and buttered toast.

  3. Sprinkle with a little 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.

  1. 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
The main vegetable, cooked by boiling until tender.
Drawn butter
Adds richness and moisture, coating the asparagus with fat for flavour.
Buttered toast
Provides a crisp, absorbent base that holds the asparagus and soaks up butter.

The step that matters

Boil the asparagus for 20 minutes. Boiling too long turns asparagus soft and dull in colour, while too short leaves the tough stalks fibrous. Timing controls both texture and colour.

“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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