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Salsify Patties

Salsify patties are made by cooking salsify, mixing it with a sauce of butter, flour, milk, cream, lemon juice, and seasonings, then filling patty cases.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Salsify Patties

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salsify

  1. Cook the salsify in milk or water until tender, then cut it into small pieces.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a small saucepan, then mix in the flour smoothly.

  2. Add the milk, stir, and cook until thickened.

  3. Mix in the cream and let it boil.

  4. Add the lemon juice, seasoning, and salsify to the sauce.

Fill and serve

  1. Fill the patty cases with the mixture and cover each with a lid.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Salsify
Provides the main bulk and the mild, distinctive flavour of the filling.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour as the base of the roux.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce that holds the filling together.
Milk
Forms the liquid of the sauce and cooks the salsify until tender.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, softer texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Mix the flour smoothly into the melted butter. Lumps form if the flour is not fully blended into the fat before liquid is added. Cooking the flour and butter together first gives a smooth, evenly thickened sauce.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, milk, cream, pepper):

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, milk, cream, pepper. 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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