Name: Fairy Butter
Ingredients: ¼ pound fresh butter; 5 or 6 hard-boiled egg yolks; 2 ounces sweet almonds; a little orange-flower water; a little grated lemon peel; pounded and sifted loaf sugar; Naples biscuits; white wine

Why it works: Almond and biscuit match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 388 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Fairy Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the butter

Wash the butter in orange-flower water.
Beat the butter with the pounded yolks of the hard-boiled eggs.
Blanch and pound the sweet almonds with a little orange-flower water until a paste forms.
Add grated lemon peel and sifted loaf sugar to the mixture.
Mix everything together and work it through a stone colander with a wooden spoon.

Serve

Soak the Naples biscuits in white wine.
Place heaps of the fairy butter over the soaked biscuits.

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.

Almond + biscuittop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together388 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,634 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,125 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,083 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,655 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fresh butter: Forms the rich, creamy base that gives the butter its body.
Hard-boiled egg yolks: Add richness and a smooth, firm texture to the mixture.
Sweet almonds: Contribute body and a nutty flavour as a fine paste.
Loaf sugar: Adds sweetness and softens the flavour of the mixture.
Naples biscuits: Absorb the white wine and provide a soft base for the topping.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, egg, almond, lemon, sugar, biscuit, white wine):

Vanillafits better
Figfits about as well
Orangethe original
Peachfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, almond, lemon, sugar, biscuit, white wine. 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.