Name: Summer Squash in Butter
Ingredients: 1 medium-sized summer squash; Coarse sea salt; Black pepper; 2 tablespoons butter

Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Summer Squash in Butter

Ingredients

1 medium-sized summer squash
Coarse sea salt
Black pepper
2 tablespoons butter

Directions

Prepare

Cut the squash into narrow strips, about ½ inch wide.
Season the strips with coarse sea salt and black pepper.
Place the squash in a bag with the butter.

Cook

Cook for 30 minutes.

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.

Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 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

Summer squash: Forms the body of the dish, and its moisture softens as it cooks.
Butter: Adds fat and rich flavor, and helps the squash cook evenly in its own juices.

“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.