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Vegetable Oysters

A dish of sliced salsify cooked with butter and flour, served over toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread 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 ↓

Vegetable Oysters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salsify

  1. Scrape the salsify roots and place them in cold water immediately.

  2. Cut the salsify into thin slices and cook until tender.

Toast the bread

  1. Toast slices of bread and place them in a deep dish.

Thicken and serve

  1. Once the salsify is tender, add a little salt and thicken slightly with butter and flour.

  2. Pour the salsify mixture over the toast.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + breadtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Salsify
Forms the main body of the dish and gives its mild, earthy flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the sauce.
Flour
Its starch swells in the hot liquid, thickening the mixture slightly.
Bread
Provides a toasted base that soaks up the thickened salsify mixture.

The step that matters

Thickening with butter and flour. Flour must be cooked into the hot butter and liquid so its starch swells evenly; added raw or in clumps it stays lumpy and can taste floury.

“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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