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Stock Green-butter

A butter colored green with spinach, anchovies, parsley, and capers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,550 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Stock Green-butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ingredients

  1. Weigh ¼ pound of the best fresh butter.

  2. Boil 2 handfuls of spinach, drain thoroughly, and squeeze the leaves through muslin to collect the greening.

  3. Scald and wipe 4 anchovies, remove backbones, and pass through a hair sieve to save the pulp.

  4. Mince enough blanched curled parsley to fill 1 tablespoon.

  5. Mince and pound enough capers to fill 1 teaspoon.

Color the butter

  1. Color the butter by lightly mixing in the spinach greening until you achieve the desired tint.

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. Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Spinach + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together99 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Spinach + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Butter + caperstop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,637 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

Butter
Provides the rich fat base that carries the color and flavor of the other ingredients.
Spinach
Supplies the green color once its greening is squeezed out and mixed into the butter.
Anchovies
Add a salty, savory depth through their pulp, which is passed through a sieve for smoothness.

The step that matters

Color the butter by lightly mixing in the spinach greening. Overmixing warms and breaks down the butter, which can turn it greasy and streaky and dull the tint. Mix gently and stop once the desired color is reached.

Swap the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, parsley, capers):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Kalefits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, capers. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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