Name: Boiled Squash
Ingredients: 1 medium squash; salt; pepper; butter

Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Boiled Squash

Ingredients

1 medium squash
salt
pepper
butter

Directions

Prepare

Cut the squash into strips and remove the soft, stringy part.
Wash the squash and cover it with boiling water.

Cook and finish

Boil for 25 minutes.
Drain in a colander for a few minutes.
Return the squash to the basin and add a little salt, pepper, and butter.
Mash the mixture until smooth.

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.

Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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, softening into a smooth purée when boiled and mashed.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, giving the mashed squash a smoother, silkier texture and flavour.

“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.