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Stewed Leeks

Leeks simmered in stock, finished with a butter‑flour sauce and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Stewed Leeks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the leeks

  1. Cut off the roots and green tops of the leeks and wash them well.

  2. Place the leeks in a saucepan with the stock and stew gently until soft.

  3. Remove the leeks and place them on a hot dish.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In a separate saucepan, melt the butter, then stir in the flour until well mixed.

  2. Strain in the stock and stir until it boils.

  3. Season with pepper, salt, and lemon juice, then pour over the leeks and serve.

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. Leek + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together162 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Leek + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together328 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Leek + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together965 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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
Are the main vegetable, becoming soft and tender as they stew in the stock.
Stock
Cooks the leeks and, thickened, forms the liquid of the sauce.
Butter
Provides fat and richness, and forms the base of the roux with the flour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with melted butter and then mixed with stock.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour and butter before adding the stock. Stirring flour into melted butter and letting it cook briefly forms a roux. Adding stock to a well-mixed roux, then bringing it to a boil, lets starch swell and thicken the sauce smoothly, while skipping this mixing can leave lumps.

Swap the leek

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits about as well
  3. Okrafits about as well
  4. Leekthe original

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