Name: Sea-kale, Boiled
Ingredients: Sea-kale; ½ teaspoon coarse sea salt; Toast; Melted butter

Why it works: Kale and butter work together. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 247 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sea-kale, Boiled

Ingredients

Sea-kale
½ teaspoon coarse sea salt
Toast
Melted butter

Directions

Prepare

Wash and trim the sea-kale, then tie it in bundles.
Bring a pot of water to a boil.

Cook

Add the sea-kale and salt.
Boil for about 20 minutes.
Drain the sea-kale and place it on the toast.

Serve

Pour melted butter over the sea-kale or serve it separately.

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.

Kale + buttertop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together247 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sea-kale: Is the main vegetable, becoming tender and mild when boiled until soft.
Melted butter: Adds richness and a smooth, fatty coating to the cooked sea-kale.

“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.