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Boiled Asparagus

A simple boiled asparagus dish seasoned with salt, pepper, and optional buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Boiled Asparagus

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Boiled Asparagus

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Shave off the hard outside of the asparagus and cut away the woody lower part.

  2. Rinse the asparagus in cold water and tie them in bunches of a dozen.

Cook

  1. Place the asparagus in plenty of boiling water with a little salt and boil for 20 minutes.

  2. Remove the strings after cooking and place the asparagus on a serving dish.

Serve

  1. If using milk, add butter to the milk and heat it with the cooked asparagus.

  2. Serve the asparagus over slices of buttered toast, if desired, and pour some of the cooking liquid over it.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

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

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Asparagus + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together650 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Asparagus + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,026 recipes

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

  5. Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Asparagus
Forms the main dish; boiling softens its fibrous stalks until tender.
Cream or milk
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy sauce through its fat and milk proteins.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the milk, giving the sauce a silkier mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Boiling for 20 minutes. Boiling too long breaks down the asparagus cell walls, leaving it soft, mushy and dull in colour. Timing it carefully keeps the stalks tender but still firm.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

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