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Stewed Endive

A dish of boiled endive cooked with broth, butter, flour, lemon juice, and a touch of 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 part of the leaves.

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

  3. Drain the endive and chop it very finely.

Stew and finish

  1. In a stewpan, combine the chopped endive and broth, adding a little salt and sugar.

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

  3. Add the butter and flour mixture along with the lemon juice, and let the sauce boil 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 + 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 main body of the dish and becomes soft and tender as it stews.
Broth
Provides the liquid that cooks the chopped endive and carries its flavour into the sauce.
Butter and flour
Flour thickens the liquid into a sauce, while butter adds richness and smooth body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Boil until the endive is tender. Stopping too early leaves the endive fibrous, while the sauce needs a full boil after the flour and butter go in so the starch thickens and tastes cooked rather than raw.

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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