Name: Baked Squash in the Shell
Ingredients: hubbard squash; coarse sea salt; black pepper; butter

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 ↓

Baked Squash in the Shell

Ingredients

hubbard squash
coarse sea salt
black pepper
butter

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Cut the hubbard squash into pieces about 4 inches square.
Place the pieces in a baking pan.
Season each piece with coarse sea salt and black pepper.
Put a lump of butter in the center of each piece.

Bake and serve

Bake at 300°F (150°C) until tender.
Serve in the shell directly from the oven.

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

Hubbard squash: Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender and sweet as it bakes.
Butter: Adds fat that enriches the flesh and carries flavor as it melts into the squash.

“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.