Name: To Preserve Butter
Ingredients: 1 pound butter; 1 ounce honey

Why it works: Butter and honey are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,327 recipes. Both carry anethole, which smells sweet, anise. The science ↓

To Preserve Butter

Ingredients

1 pound butter
1 ounce honey

Directions

Make the butter

Incorporate honey into the butter in a bowl, mixing thoroughly until well combined.
Store in a sealed container.

Store

Keep in a cool, dark place.

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.

Butter + honeytop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,327 recipes

Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter: Forms the rich fatty base that carries the flavour and gives the spread its texture.
Honey: Adds sweetness and a floral aroma, and its sugars help the mixture stay smooth when spread.

“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.