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Dessert

Watercress Butter

A butter flavored with watercress, capers, and fresh butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Watercress and capers share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 60 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Watercress Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the watercress

  1. Pick and wash the watercress leaves.

  2. Scald the leaves and pound them in a mortar.

Make the butter

  1. Blend the pounded watercress with the fresh butter and capers.

  2. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve.

  3. Set the butter in a cold place and shape it with a butter bat.

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. Watercress + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together60 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Watercress + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together842 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

Watercress leaves
Provides the green colour and a peppery, fresh flavour to the butter.
Fresh butter
Forms the rich base that carries the watercress and holds the shape when chilled.
Capers
Add a sharp, salty acidity that cuts through the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Passing the mixture through a fine sieve. Pounded watercress leaves contain fibres that stay coarse if not strained out. Sieving gives a smooth, even texture and removes stringy pieces that would spoil the butter's finish.

“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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