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Dessert

Montpellier Butter

A green butter made from watercress leaves, butter, cayenne pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Watercress and pepper work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 983 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Montpellier Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick the very green leaves from freshly gathered watercress.

  2. Grind the leaves in a mortar until fine.

Make the butter

  1. Add fresh butter and mix until a smooth green paste is obtained.

  2. Season with cayenne and salt to taste.

Store

  1. Store in small pots, well covered.

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. Watercress + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Watercress + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together842 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Watercress leaves
Provides the green colour and a peppery, slightly bitter flavour.
Butter
Carries the leaf flavour and gives the paste a smooth, spreadable texture.

The step that matters

Grinding the leaves until fine. Leaves left in coarse pieces make a gritty, unevenly coloured paste. Fine grinding breaks down cell walls so the juices and colour blend fully into the butter.

“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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