Name: Sea Kale
Ingredients: Sea kale; ½ cup melted butter; Toast

Why it works: Kale and butter work together. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 247 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sea Kale

Ingredients

Sea kale
½ cup melted butter
Toast

Directions

Prepare

Wash the sea kale and tie it in bundles.

Cook and serve

Put it into boiling water with a little coarse sea salt and let it boil quickly for 20 minutes.
Drain the kale and serve it on toast with melted butter.

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.

Kale + buttertop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together247 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sea kale: Forms the main vegetable, becoming tender when boiled until soft.
Melted butter: Adds richness and moisture, coating the kale and toast with fat.

“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.