Why it works: Butter and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓
Butter
Ingredients
Directions
Wash and dry the butter.
Place the butter in a jar and cover the top with moist sugar in a bag or between two folds of linen.
To preserve, clean the butter well and mix with a little coarse sea salt.
Put the mixture into a porous vessel and keep it cool with a wet cloth or in a cooling machine.
Melt the butter at the lowest temperature and let it cool to separate the water for long-term storage.
Strain milk into flat pans no deeper than 2-3 inches.
Use a large fruit bottle or churn to make butter from cream.
Shake the bottle on a roll of cloth until butter forms, then withdraw the buttermilk and add cool water, shaking again until the butter is in a mass.
Transfer the butter to a basin and work it with a flat stick until firm, then shape it as desired.
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.
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Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together98,233 recipes
Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
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