Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Asparagus with White Sauce

A boiled asparagus served with a white sauce made from butter, flour, milk, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Boiled Asparagus with White Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the asparagus

  1. Trim the asparagus and cut it into equal lengths.

  2. Wash the asparagus in cold water.

  3. Place the asparagus in a saucepan and cover it with boiling water. Close the lid for a moment, then remove the lid.

Cook the asparagus

  1. Let it boil for 20 minutes.

Make the white sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a small saucepan and mix in the flour.

  2. Gradually add 1½ cups of the boiling liquid from the asparagus, stirring until the mixture boils.

  3. Add the milk and cook for 2 more minutes.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  3. Asparagus + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,968 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Asparagus + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together936 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Asparagus
The main vegetable, cooked in boiling water until tender.
Butter
Provides fat and richness, and forms the base of the sauce with the flour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with melted butter and liquid.
Milk
Adds liquid and body to the white sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and smoothness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the liquid to the roux. Adding the hot liquid gradually while stirring keeps the flour mixed in evenly, so the sauce thickens smoothly without lumps.

Swap the asparagus

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, milk, cream, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, milk, cream, pepper. 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.

You might also like

Asparagus SoupAsparagus Soup179 recipesAsparagus SaladAsparagus Salad77 recipesCream of AsparagusCream of Asparagus38 recipesBoiled AsparagusBoiled Asparagus27 recipes