Skip to main content
Main

Sea-Kale

Sea Kale is boiled young sea‑kale shoots served on buttered toast with a butter‑flour‑egg‑lemon sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Kale and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 226 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Sea-Kale

Ingredients

Directions

Boil and serve

  1. Boil young sea-kale shoots until tender.

  2. Serve on buttered toast with melted butter poured over.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, rub 2 to 4 ounces of butter into flour until smooth.

  2. Stir in egg yolks and a squeeze of lemon juice.

  3. Serve sauce alongside sea-kale, but do not pour over.

Fried version

  1. For a fried version, cut cold sea-kale into pieces, dip in batter, and fry until golden.

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. Kale + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together226 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Kale + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together147 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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

Butter
Adds richness and flavour, and carries the sauce's smooth, creamy body.
Flour
Thickens the butter into a smooth base that helps hold the sauce together.
Egg yolks
Emulsify with the butter and thicken the sauce as they set gently with heat.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and yolk sauce.
Batter for frying
Forms a crisp, golden coating when the cut shoots are fried.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolks and lemon juice. Egg yolks can curdle or scramble if the sauce is too hot, so they should be added gently and the sauce kept warm rather than boiling. Lemon juice added at the same time can make the sauce thin or split, so a small squeeze is enough.

Swap the kale

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

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

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

More sea kale recipes

Boiled 18Puree 4Fried 3and Asparagus 3with Brown Sauce 3 See all 20 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes