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Dessert

Preserving Butter

A method of preserving butter by mixing salt, sugar, and saltpetre and sealing it for storage.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Preserving Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cure

  1. Mix the coarse sea salt, white sugar, and saltpetre together.

Preserve the butter

  1. Take 1 ounce of the mixture and work it into 1 pound of butter.

  2. Seal the butter for storage.

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. 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

Butter
Serves as the fat base that the salt cure is worked into for preservation.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture and inhibits microbial growth, preserving the butter.
Saltpetre
Acts as a curing agent that helps preserve the butter and inhibit spoilage.
White sugar
Adds mild sweetness that balances the salty flavor of the cured butter.

The step that matters

Working the cure into the butter. The cure must be evenly worked through the butter so the preservation is consistent throughout, rather than concentrated in pockets. Uneven mixing leaves some portions less protected from spoilage.

“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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