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Endives, with Cream Sauce

A dish of boiled endives sautéed with butter, seasoned with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and finished with cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Endive and nutmeg share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 47 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Endives, with Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the endives

  1. Trim off the three outer hard layers of green leaves from the Endives.

  2. Cut off the roots and wash the heads in plenty of cold water.

  3. Separate the leaves to check for small worms, then drain them.

  4. Boil lightly salted water in a saucepan and cook the Endives until tender.

  5. Immerse them in cold water, then drain and press dry between your hands.

  6. Chop the Endives finely on a chopping board.

Make the creamed endives

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan, then add the chopped Endives.

  2. Stir over a brisk fire for a few minutes, seasoning with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

  3. Add the Cream sauce and mix well until warmed through.

  4. Serve with small pieces of toasted bread around the dish.

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. Endive + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together47 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  4. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Endive + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together308 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Endives
Form the bulk of the dish; their moisture is pressed out before cooking so the mixture stays thick.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and helping the chopped endives cook gently in the pan.
Cream sauce
Adds moisture and richness, binding the chopped endives into a creamy mixture when warmed through.

The step that matters

Press the endives dry after cooking. Cooked endives hold a lot of water. If they are not pressed dry, the extra moisture dilutes the butter and cream sauce, leaving the dish watery rather than creamy.

Swap the endive

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, nutmeg, cream, sauce):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Endivethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, nutmeg, cream, sauce. 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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