Why it works: Lettuce and barley share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 33 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓
Herb Pudding
Ingredients
Directions
Gather wild lettuce leaves and young shoots of common nettle.
Chop them finely.
Mix with pearl barley.
Place the mixture in a bag and boil in water until cooked.
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.
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Lettuce + barleytop 7% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together33 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
- Wild lettuce leaves
- Adds leafy bulk and moisture, with a mild, slightly bitter green flavour.
- Young shoots of common nettle
- Adds a green, earthy flavour and softens into the mixture when cooked.
- Pearl barley
- Its starch absorbs water as it cooks, giving the pudding body and a chewy texture.
The step that matters
Boil until the barley is fully cooked. Pearl barley absorbs water and swells as it heats. If it is undercooked, it stays hard and chewy, so the pudding will not set into a soft, even texture.
“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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