Name: To Bake Squash
Ingredients: 1 squash; salt to taste; pepper to taste; butter to taste

Why it works: Pepper and butter 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 ↓

To Bake Squash

Ingredients

1 squash
salt to taste
pepper to taste
butter to taste

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Cut the squash in half and scrape out the seeds.
Place the squash halves cut side up on a round pie tin.

Bake and serve

Bake at 350°F (175°C) until tender.
Once done, scrape the flesh out of the rind and mash it.
Season with salt, pepper, and 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.

Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked 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

Squash: Forms the main body of the dish and, once baked, becomes soft, mashable flesh.
Butter: Adds fat and richness to the mashed squash for a smoother, more savoury flavour.

“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.