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Puree of Green Asparagus, with Rice

A puree of boiled asparagus mixed with egg yolks, butter, and rice flour, served with reserved asparagus heads.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Asparagus and rice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 261 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Puree of Green Asparagus, with Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the asparagus

  1. Break the stalks of the asparagus and cut off the heads to ⅓ inch long.

  2. Set the heads aside.

  3. Cut the remaining stalks into small pieces.

  4. Plunge them into boiling salted water. Boil until firm. Drain.

  5. Pound the boiled asparagus. Mix in the egg yolks and butter. Pass through a sieve.

Make the soup

  1. In a stewpan, dilute the rice flour with boiling broth. Stir until it boils. Simmer for 45 minutes.

  2. Skim off the fat.

  3. Season with salt and sugar.

  4. Add the asparagus puree.

Serve

  1. Pour into a tureen.

  2. Add the reserved asparagus heads.

  3. Serve.

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. Asparagus + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together261 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Asparagus + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together936 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Asparagus
Supplies the main flavor and green color, and its pureed stalks give the soup body.
Egg yolks
Enrich the puree, adding richness and a smoother, silkier texture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel.
Rice flour
Thickens the broth as it cooks, giving the soup its body.
Broth
Forms the liquid base that the rice flour thickens and the asparagus flavors.

The step that matters

Stir the rice flour until it boils. Rice flour must be stirred continuously as it heats in the broth, otherwise it clumps and stays grainy instead of thickening smoothly. Simmering then cooks out the raw starch taste.

Swap the asparagus

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter, rice, flour, sugar):

  1. Leekfits about as well
  2. Sweet potatofits about as well
  3. Asparagusthe original
  4. Arrowrootfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, rice, flour, sugar. 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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