Name: Mixture for Salting Butter
Ingredients: ½ pound fine salt; ¼ pound pulverized loaf sugar; 1 ounce mixture per pound of butter

Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Mixture for Salting Butter

Ingredients

½ pound fine salt
¼ pound pulverized loaf sugar
1 ounce mixture per pound of butter

Directions

Mix the fine salt and pulverized loaf sugar together well.
Add 1 ounce of the mixture to every pound of butter to keep it sweet for winter use.

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.

Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fine salt: Preserves the butter and seasons it, slowing spoilage so it keeps for winter.
Pulverized loaf sugar: Adds a little sweetness and blends evenly with the salt for even seasoning.

“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.