Name: Butter, to Remove the Taste of Turnips
Ingredients: 1 oz mixture of loaf sugar, saltpetre, and common salt for every pound of butter; 16 oz butter; common salt (optional)

Why it works: Sugar and butter 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, to Remove the Taste of Turnips

Ingredients

1 oz mixture of loaf sugar, saltpetre, and common salt for every pound of butter
16 oz butter
common salt (optional)

Directions

Prepare the butter

Mix 1 oz of the sugar and salt mixture into every pound of butter.
Pack the butter tightly in strong glass jars.
Cover with a bladder to keep it fresh for many months.

Clarify instead (alternative)

Alternatively, clarify the butter by melting it in hot water, letting it settle, and pouring off the clear butter.
Cool the clarified butter quickly before storing.

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.

Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter: Forms the bulk of the preserve, providing richness and carrying the flavour of the salt mixture.
Common salt: Helps preserve the butter and adds savoury flavour.

“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.