Name: Salsify
Ingredients: 1 lb salsify; 1 oz butter; white sauce or melted butter sauce (for serving)

Why it works: Butter and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Salsify

Ingredients

1 lb salsify
1 oz butter
white sauce or melted butter sauce (for serving)

Directions

Prepare

Boil the salsify gently in water until tender, about 30 minutes.
Strain and rub the salsify with a clean coarse cloth to remove the skin.
Cut the salsify into 2.5-inch pieces and return them to the saucepan with butter.

Cook and serve

Heat the salsify over the fire until thoroughly hot.
Arrange in a vegetable dish and pour white sauce or melted butter sauce over it before serving.

Variations

Optionally, after boiling, egg and crumb the salsify, or dip it in batter and fry.
For a scalloped version, prepare like oysters but add a few drops of anchovy 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.

Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together15,338 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

What each ingredient does

Salsify: Is the main vegetable, becoming tender through gentle boiling before it is served.
Butter: Adds richness and a silky coating when the salsify is reheated in the pan.

“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.