Skip to main content
Main

Chicory with Cream

A boiled chicory dish finished with butter, sugar, nutmeg, flour, cream, and egg yolks, garnished with hard‑boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Chicory with Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicory

  1. Wash the chicory and boil it in a large kettle of salted water for 30 minutes.

  2. Drain and soak in cold water for 5 minutes, then drain again and press gently until dry.

  3. Chop the chicory finely and place it in a saucepan with butter, sugar, salt, and nutmeg.

Make the creamed sauce

  1. Sprinkle the flour over the mixture and mix well.

  2. Add the thick cream and stir over heat until boiling hot.

  3. Remove from heat and beat the egg yolks until light.

  4. Stir in 2 tablespoons of cream and mix into the chicory.

Serve

  1. Transfer to a heated dish and garnish with hard-boiled eggs before serving.

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.

  1. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Chicory + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together47 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Chicory + nutmegtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9 recipes

    Shared aroma: maltol (caramel, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicory
Forms the bulk of the dish and is the main vegetable that the cream coats.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and gives a smooth texture.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the mixture as it heats, so the cream becomes a coating rather than runny.
Thick cream
Adds moisture and richness, and helps form a creamy sauce around the chicory.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce gently when stirred in off the heat.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks off the heat. Egg yolks set at around 70°C and can scramble if they meet very hot liquid. Removing the pan from the heat first and mixing the yolks in gently keeps the sauce smooth and thick.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes