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Garlic Butter or Gascony Butter

A butter infused with boiled garlic, nutmeg, and red pepper, strained and stored.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Garlic Butter or Gascony Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the garlic cloves for 10 minutes.

  2. Drain the garlic and pound it in a mortar with the butter.

Season and store

  1. Add nutmeg and red pepper, then mix well.

  2. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve and store in a cool place.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Garlic
Provides the main flavour, and boiling mellows its sharpness before pounding.
Butter
Carries the garlic as a rich, spreadable fat and gives the mixture its smooth body.

The step that matters

Rubbing the mixture through a fine sieve. Pounded garlic and butter can stay grainy or fibrous. Pressing it through a fine sieve breaks up remaining pieces, giving the smooth texture the dish depends on.

Swap the garlic

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, butter, nutmeg, pepper. 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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