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Endives with Veal Geavy

A dish of coarsely chopped endives simmered in a veal gravy with butter, flour, salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 Veal Geavy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy base

  1. Chop the prepared endives coarsely.

  2. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  3. Add the flour to the melted butter and cook until light brown, stirring constantly.

Finish the endives

  1. Add the chopped endives, seasoning with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

  2. Mix well and slowly add the veal gravy.

  3. Add a piece of butter 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. 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. Flour + endivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together111 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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

Butter
Melted with flour to form a roux and enriches the finished sauce with fat and flavor.
Flour
Cooked in melted butter to form a roux that thickens the veal gravy.
Endives
Chopped and simmered in the sauce as the main vegetable, adding a slightly bitter flavor.
Veal gravy
Forms the liquid base that the roux thickens and the endives cook in.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in butter. The flour must cook until light brown, stirring constantly, so it loses its raw starchy taste and thickens smoothly without lumps or scorching.

Swap the endive

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Endivethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, nutmeg, veal. 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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