Name: Fried Squashes
Ingredients: 2 medium squash; 2 eggs; butter for frying; coarse sea salt

Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Fried Squashes

Ingredients

2 medium squash
2 eggs
butter for frying
coarse sea salt

Directions

Prepare the squash

Cut the squash into thin slices.
Sprinkle the slices with coarse sea salt and let them stand for a few minutes.

Coat and fry

Beat the eggs in a bowl.
Dip the salted squash slices into the beaten eggs.
Fry the egg-coated squash in butter until browned.

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.

Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together118,967 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Squash: Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender when cooked through.
Eggs: Form a coating that sets when fried and helps the slices brown.
Butter: Conducts heat to the coating and adds fat for browning and flavor.

“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.