Name: To Preserve Butter
Ingredients: 2 parts coarse sea salt; 1 part saltpetre; 1 part sifted sugar; 1 ounce of the salt mixture per pound of butter

Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

To Preserve Butter

Ingredients

2 parts coarse sea salt
1 part saltpetre
1 part sifted sugar
1 ounce of the salt mixture per pound of butter

Directions

Make the cure

Mix the coarse sea salt, saltpetre, and sifted sugar together well.
Add 1 ounce of this mixture for every pound of butter.

Cure the butter

Place the butter in a pan or tub and cover it tightly.
Store in a cool, dry place for three weeks.

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.

Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Coarse sea salt: Draws out moisture and slows microbial growth, which is the main way the butter is preserved.
Saltpetre: Acts as a curing agent that further inhibits spoilage bacteria during the long cure.
Sifted sugar: Adds mild sweetness and balances the sharpness of the salt in the finished butter.

The step that matters

Mixing the cure evenly and measuring the dose. Saltpetre is potent, so the cure must be thoroughly mixed and weighed at 1 ounce per pound of butter. Uneven mixing leaves pockets of concentrated curing salts and weak spots that may not preserve the butter safely.

“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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To Preserve Butter