Skip to main content
Dessert

Pistachio Butter

A spread made by boiling pistachios, removing skins, pounding them with water, and mixing with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pistachio and butter work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 587 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Pistachio Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pistachios

  1. Boil pistachios in water until the peel can be easily removed.

  2. Drain and cool them in cold water.

Make the butter

  1. Clean the pistachios and finely pound them while moistening with water.

  2. Add butter and pass through a fine sieve.

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. Pistachio + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together587 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Pistachios
Provide the main nutty flavor and the oily, paste-forming base of the butter.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the pistachio paste a smoother, spreadable texture.

The step that matters

Pounding while moistening with water. Pistachios release oil slowly when crushed, and adding a little water helps keep the paste from heating and turning greasy or grainy. Passing it through a fine sieve then removes remaining fibers and lumps for a smooth result.

“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

Pistachio Ice CreamPistachio Ice Cream36 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes