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To Dress Asparagus and Sea-klale

A simple dish of boiled asparagus served on toasted bread with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter 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 ↓

To Dress Asparagus and Sea-klale

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the asparagus

  1. Scrape the asparagus and wash them in cold water.

  2. Bind the asparagus in small bundles with the green heads together, cutting them off evenly to about 5 inches long.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil water with a little coarse sea salt and add the asparagus, cooking until the heads are tender.

  2. Toast the bread slices, then dip them in the boiling water and place on a dish.

  3. Untie the asparagus and place it on the bread with the heads in the center.

  4. Serve melted butter in a separate dish.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Asparagus + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together363 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Asparagus + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,026 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Asparagus
Forms the main vegetable body and provides tender texture when cooked until the heads are soft.
Bread slices
Toasted and dipped in boiling water, they soften slightly and act as a base that holds the asparagus.
Butter
Melted and served separately, it adds richness and fat that complements the mild asparagus.

The step that matters

Cooking until the heads are tender. Asparagus heads cook much faster than the stalks. Overcooking turns them mushy and dull in color, while undercooking leaves the stalks fibrous, so timing must be watched closely.

Swap the asparagus

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

  1. Leekfits about as well
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Asparagusthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter. 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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