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Stewed Endive

A dish of boiled endive simmered in broth with butter, flour, lemon juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Endive and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 111 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Stewed Endive

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the endive

  1. Wash the endive thoroughly to remove insects and discard the green parts of the leaves.

  2. Place the endive in boiling salted water and cook for 10 minutes.

  3. Remove the endive, drain it well, and chop it finely.

Stew and finish

  1. In a stew-pan, combine the chopped endive with the broth, a little salt, and the sugar.

  2. Boil the mixture until the endive is tender, checking tenderness by squeezing a piece between your thumb and finger.

  3. Add the butter, flour, and lemon juice to the pan.

  4. Let the sauce boil briefly.

  5. Serve.

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 + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together111 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Endive + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together108 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Endive
Forms the bulk of the dish and softens into a tender, spoonable texture when stewed.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and gives the sauce a smooth mouthfeel.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a sauce as its starch swells with heat.
Broth
Supplies the savoury liquid that the endive stews in and becomes the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness and richness.

The step that matters

Adding the flour and boiling the sauce. Flour thickens only when its starch is heated enough to swell, so the sauce must boil briefly after the flour and butter go in. Otherwise it stays thin and tastes raw-floury.

Swap the endive

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, lemon, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, lemon, sugar. 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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