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Boiled Leeks

Boiled leeks served with a white sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Boiled Leeks

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the leeks

  1. Combine the leeks, butter, salt, pepper, and boiling water in a double saucepan.

  2. Cover and place the inner saucepan into the outer one once the water boils.

  3. Boil for 2 hours.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In a separate pan, make a white sauce by combining flour, butter, and milk.

  2. Add the juice from the inner saucepan to the white sauce and boil while stirring.

  3. Pour the white sauce over the cooked leeks 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Leek + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together328 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. Leek + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together965 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Leeks
Form the main body of the dish and soften into a tender vegetable during long boiling.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps make the white sauce smooth.
Flour
Thickens the milk and butter into a white sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the white sauce, giving it body and creaminess.

The step that matters

Stirring the white sauce while it boils. Flour needs constant stirring as the sauce heats, otherwise it can clump and scorch on the bottom. Stirring keeps the starch dispersed so the sauce thickens evenly and stays smooth.

Swap the leek

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Leekthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, flour, milk. 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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