Name: Fancy Butters
Ingredients: ¼ pound best fresh butter; 2 handfuls spinach; 4 anchovies

Why it works: Butter and spinach are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,583 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Fancy Butters

Ingredients

¼ pound best fresh butter
2 handfuls spinach
4 anchovies

Directions

Weigh ¼ pound of the best fresh butter.
Boil 2 handfuls of spinach, drain thoroughly, and squeeze the leaves through muslin to collect the green liquid.
Scald and wipe 4 anchovies to remove oil, remove their backbones, and pass them through a fine sieve to save the pulp.

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.

Butter + spinachtop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,583 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter: Provides fat and richness, carrying the flavour of the other ingredients.
Spinach: Supplies the green colour and a vegetal flavour through its collected liquid.
Anchovies: Adds a salty, savoury depth to the butter once passed through a sieve to a pulp.

“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.