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To Dress Dandelions Ltke Spinach, or As a Salad

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Dandelion and flour share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Dress Dandelions Ltke Spinach, or As a Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Wash the young dandelion leaves thoroughly.

  2. Boil the leaves in a large pot of salted water until tender.

  3. Drain the leaves well and press them dry with a wooden spoon.

  4. Serve the leaves plain with melted butter, or chop and heat them with salt, pepper, butter rolled in flour, and gravy or cream.

  5. For a salad, use very young leaves, wash and drain them, then dress with oil and vinegar or your preferred sauce.

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. Dandelion + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together35 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Dandelion + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together57 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

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