Why it works: Butter and pepper 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 ↓
Spawn Butter
Ingredients
Directions
Rub the live spawn through a hair sieve with an equal quantity of butter.
Cook the butter in the mixture or sauce to which it is added to make it red.
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.
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Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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
- Live spawn
- Provides the rich, savory flavor and red color that define the butter.
- Butter
- Carries the spawn through the sieve and adds fat and smooth richness.
The step that matters
Cooking the butter into the sauce. The butter must be cooked in the mixture or sauce it is added to, so the spawn colors it properly. Adding it without cooking leaves the color and flavor underdeveloped.
“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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