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Dessert

Drawn Butter

Melted butter flavored with optional ingredients, served warm with meat, game, or fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Drawn Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the butter

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat.

  2. Add any optional flavors like anchovies, okra, onions, celery, parsley, mint, spices, or relishes as desired.

  3. Stir until well combined and heated through.

Serve

  1. Serve warm with meat, game, or fish.

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. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Okra + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together206 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Okra + oniontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together715 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Okra + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together137 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  5. Parsley + minttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,198 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Provides the rich fat base that carries the flavour and gives the sauce its body.

Swap the okra

The recipe marks okra as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, celery, parsley, mint):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Okrathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, celery, parsley, mint. 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.

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