Name: Salt Peanuts
Ingredients: 2 cups fresh roasted peanuts; 2 tablespoons butter; ¼ teaspoon salt

Why it works: Peanut and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,754 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Salt Peanuts

Ingredients

2 cups fresh roasted peanuts
2 tablespoons butter
¼ teaspoon salt

Directions

Shell the fresh roasted peanuts and remove the skins.
Heat the butter in a skillet over medium heat.
Add the peanuts to the skillet and stir.
Sprinkle salt over the peanuts and stir until heated through.

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.

Peanut + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,754 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Peanuts: Provide the main body and nutty flavor of the snack.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, helping the salt cling and the peanuts taste fuller.

“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.