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Green Butter

Green butter made from parsley, anchovies, and butter, served as a spread with toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28,563 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Green Butter

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the parsley

  1. Wash and carefully pick the parsley.

Make the green butter

  1. Pound the parsley thoroughly with the anchovies.

  2. Rub the mixture through a sieve.

  3. Mix the parsley and anchovy mixture with the butter.

  4. Shape into small balls and serve with hot toast.

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. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Parsley
Provides the green colour and fresh herbal flavour that defines the butter.
Anchovies
Add a salty, savoury depth that rounds out the butter's flavour.
Butter
Carries the herb and anchovy flavours and gives the mixture a rich, spreadable body.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture through a sieve. Pounded parsley and anchovy contain fibrous bits that make the butter gritty or stringy. Pressing the mixture through a sieve breaks these down and yields a smooth, even paste before the butter is added.

“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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