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Lettuce Stuffed and Fried

A dish of lettuce leaves stuffed, coated in egg and breadcrumbs, then fried in lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,483 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Lettuce Stuffed and Fried

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the lettuce as described in the previous recipe.

  2. Drain the cooked lettuce on a sieve and pat dry with a napkin.

Bread and fry

  1. Bread the lettuce, dip it in beaten eggs, and then bread it again in fresh bread crumbs.

  2. Fry the lettuce in hot lard until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve on a napkin, garnished with fried parsley.

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. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Lettuce + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Bread + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Egg + parsleytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,765 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked first and then coated and fried.
Beaten eggs
Act as a binding layer that helps the bread crumbs adhere to the lettuce.
Fresh bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating that browns during frying.
Lard
Conducts heat for frying and promotes browning of the crumb coating.

The step that matters

Drain and pat the lettuce dry before breading. Surface moisture keeps the egg and crumbs from sticking and creates steam under the coating, which can make it fall off or fry unevenly in hot fat.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, bread, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, bread, parsley. 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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