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Standard Green Butter

A butter blended with greens, anchovies, and capers, forming a pale green spread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and capers share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 99 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Standard Green Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Weigh the butter and set aside.

  2. Boil the greens for 5 minutes, then drain and press out all water. Pass the greens through a sieve to collect the greening in a bowl.

  3. Scald and wipe the anchovies, remove the backbones, and pass through a sieve to save the pulp. Pound the anchovy pulp with the capers.

Make the butter

  1. Gradually mix the spinach-greening into the butter until you achieve a pale green color. Incorporate the anchovy and caper mixture into the butter.

  2. Place the butter in the ice box or over crushed ice until firm, then shape as desired.

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. Spinach + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together99 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + caperstop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,637 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. 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
Forms the rich base that carries the flavors and sets firm when chilled.
Spinach, watercress, or country greens
Supplies the green color and a mild, fresh vegetable flavor to the butter.
Anchovies
Adds a savory, salty depth that gives the butter its character.
Capers
Adds a sharp, briny acidity that cuts through the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Pressing out all water from the greens. Leftover water in the greens dilutes the butter and can make it weep or soften, so the greening should be as dry as possible before mixing.

Swap the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, capers):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, capers. 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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