Name: Potage De Garbure Aux Laitues Braisees
Ingredients: 20 lettuce heads; consommé (reduced); coarse black pepper; crusts (for gratin)

Why it works: Lettuce and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,037 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Potage De Garbure Aux Laitues Braisees

Ingredients

20 lettuce heads
consommé (reduced)
coarse black pepper
crusts (for gratin)

Directions

Prepare

Cook the lettuce heads according to the method for braised lettuce soup.
Prepare the crusts as usual with the reduced consommé and a pinch of coarse black pepper.

Assemble and gratin

In a soup tureen, create a layer of gratin crusts, followed by a layer of lettuce.
Continue layering the lettuce and crusts, ensuring the lettuce covers the soup.
Add the base of the lettuce and gently gratin the soup.

Serve

Serve the soup, with the remaining colored consommé in a separate silver saucepan.

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.

Lettuce + peppertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,037 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce heads: Form the bulk of the soup and provide its vegetal, tender body.
Consommé: Supplies the savoury liquid base that flavours the crusts and soup.
Crusts: Soak up consommé and form the layered gratin structure of the dish.

“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.