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Another Way to Serve Asparagus

A side dish of boiled asparagus finished with a butter, flour, and egg yolk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Asparagus and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 566 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Another Way to Serve Asparagus

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the asparagus

  1. Cut the asparagus into small lengths and boil in salted water for 10 to 15 minutes.

  2. Drain the asparagus.

Make the butter sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan and stir in the flour and sugar.

  2. Add parsley and green onion.

  3. Add the asparagus and pour in boiling water to barely cover it.

  4. Bring to a boil.

  5. Remove the parsley and onion.

  6. Take the pot off the heat.

  7. Carefully stir in the egg yolk.

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. Asparagus + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together566 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Asparagus + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,212 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
Is the main vegetable, providing the bulk and tender texture of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor and giving the sauce a smooth body.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the butter sauce by absorbing liquid when cooked into the melted butter.
Egg yolk
Enriches and thickens the sauce as it sets gently with the residual heat.

The step that matters

Carefully stir in the egg yolk. Egg yolk thickens when heated but can scramble if the sauce is too hot. Removing the pot from the heat first lets it thicken gently and stay smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (asparagus, butter, flour, sugar, parsley, egg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against asparagus, butter, flour, sugar, parsley, egg. 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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