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Brussels-sprouts

Sautéed Brussels sprouts with butter, salt, sugar, flour, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Brussels-sprouts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove dead leaves from the Brussels sprouts and soak them in cold water for 30 minutes.

  2. Wash the sprouts and boil them in plenty of slightly salted water until tender, about 30 minutes.

  3. Drain the water and place the sprouts in a frying pan.

Sauté and serve

  1. Add 1 ½ tablespoons of butter, 1 tablespoon of coarse sea salt, 1 teaspoon of sugar, 1 teaspoon of flour, and ¼ teaspoon of pepper.

  2. Shake the pan over the heat until the sprouts are slightly colored, then transfer to a warm dish and serve.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Brussels sprouts
Form the main body of the dish and cook to a tender, lightly browned texture.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavor and helps the sprouts brown in the pan.
Sugar
Adds a touch of sweetness that helps the sprouts caramelize and brown.
Flour
Lightly coats the sprouts, helping them take on color and hold some butter in the pan.

The step that matters

Shaking the pan over the heat until slightly colored. Sprouts that are already tender need only brief, high heat to brown. Overcooking them in the pan makes them soft and dull, while stopping too early leaves them pale and without the caramelized flavor that browning adds.

Swap the brussels sprouts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, flour, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Brussels sproutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, flour, pepper. 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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