Name: Asperges En Branches K LA Sauce Blanche
Ingredients: 1 large bundle of asparagus; French melted butter

Why it works: Asparagus and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,026 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Asperges En Branches K LA Sauce Blanche

Ingredients

1 large bundle of asparagus
French melted butter

Directions

Prepare and cook

Trim the ends of the asparagus and wash them thoroughly.
Boil the asparagus in salted water until tender, about 5-7 minutes.
Drain the asparagus and arrange it on a serving plate.

Serve

Melt the butter in a saucepan and pour it over the asparagus before serving.

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.

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: Is the main vegetable, cooked by boiling until tender.
French melted butter: Adds richness and a silky coating over the cooked asparagus.

“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.