Skip to main content
Main

Salsify Ob Vegetable Oysters

Breaded salsify served with a creamy milk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Salsify Ob Vegetable Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salsify

  1. Scrape the outside of the salsify and parboil until tender.

  2. Slice the salsify crosswise.

Bread and fry

  1. Dip the slices in the beaten egg, then coat with fine bread crumbs.

  2. Fry the breaded salsify in lard until golden brown.

Make the creamy version and serve

  1. For a creamy version, cook the sliced salsify in enough water to cover until tender.

  2. In a separate pot, mix the rich milk with flour, season with butter, pepper, and coarse sea salt, and bring to a boil.

  3. Pour the creamy mixture over slices of toasted bread or serve with crackers.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Salsify
Forms the main vegetable body of the dish, cooked until tender before slicing and frying.
Beaten egg
Acts as a binder so the bread crumbs stick to the salsify slices.
Fine bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating when fried in lard.
Rich milk
Forms the base of the creamy sauce, giving it a smooth, rich body.
Flour
Thickens the milk so the creamy mixture becomes a sauce rather than thin liquid.

The step that matters

Frying the breaded salsify in lard. Frying at a steady heat browns the crumb coating before the egg and crumbs can burn or turn greasy. Salsify should be fully tender after parboiling, so the frying step only needs to crisp and brown the outside.

“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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes