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Lettuce Stewed

A simple stew of lettuce cooked with butter, nutmeg, pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Lettuce Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the lettuce thoroughly and soak it in salt water for 30 minutes.

  2. Plunge the lettuce into boiling salted water with ¼ teaspoon of baking soda.

  3. Boil uncovered for 15 to 20 minutes, then drain and squeeze out excess water.

Make the stewed lettuce

  1. Chop the lettuce and place it in a saucepan with butter, nutmeg, pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

  2. Stir and cook for about 5 minutes.

Serve

  1. Transfer to a serving dish and serve hot.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Lettuce + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together184 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Lettuce + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce
Forms the bulk of the dish and softens into a tender, spoonable texture when boiled and stewed.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel as it cooks with the lettuce.
Nutmeg
Contributes a warm, aromatic spice flavor that complements the cooked greens.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Squeeze out the excess water after boiling. Lettuce holds a lot of water. If it is not squeezed dry, the stew becomes watery and dilutes the butter and seasonings, so the flavor and texture suffer.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, nutmeg, pepper, 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.

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