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Lettuces with Gravy

A cabbage lettuce dish simmered with broth, stock pot fat, onion, and gravy, served with optional bread slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Lettuces with Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lettuces

  1. Trim off all the outside leaves from the lettuces.

  2. Wash and blanch the lettuces for 10 minutes, then cool and squeeze out the water.

  3. Cut the lettuces in half.

  4. Lay the halves open on a dish.

  5. Season with salt.

Braise

  1. Tie the halves together and place them in a 2‑quart stewpan.

  2. Cover with broth.

  3. Add stock pot fat, faggot, and onion.

  4. Place a round of paper on top.

  5. Simmer for 2 hours.

  6. Drain on a cloth.

Shape and serve

  1. Untie the lettuces.

  2. Open the lettuces again.

  3. Cut out the stalks.

  4. Fold the leaves into oval shapes, about 3 inches by 2 inches.

  5. Dish them in a circle.

  6. Reduce the household gravy to half its quantity.

  7. Pour the reduced gravy over the lettuces.

  8. Optionally, place thin slices of bread in the intervals between the lettuces.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Thyme + clovetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Cabbage + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together622 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

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

  5. Lettuce + thymetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together247 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cabbage lettuces
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and pliable after blanching and braising.
Stock pot fat
Adds richness and carries flavour into the braising liquid.
Broth
Moistens the lettuces during simmering and seasons them as they cook.
Household gravy
Provides the sauce, and reducing it concentrates flavour and thickens its body.

The step that matters

Squeeze out the water after blanching. Blanched lettuce holds a lot of water. Squeezing it out before braising lets the leaves absorb the broth and fat rather than diluting them, and helps the halves hold their shape.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, parsley, thyme, onion, clove, bread):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, parsley, thyme, onion, clove, bread. 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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