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To Dress Asparagus with a Brown Sauce

A brown sauce made from asparagus, endive, lettuce, soup, butter, flour, seasonings, and ketchup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Endive and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 284 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

To Dress Asparagus with a Brown Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scrape the asparagus clean and soak it in clean water.

  2. Cut the asparagus into pieces about an inch long.

  3. Wash and chop the endive and young lettuce.

Make the sauce

  1. Stew the endive and lettuce in a little soup until tender.

  2. Thicken the mixture with a bit of butter rolled in flour.

  3. Season with white pepper, coarse sea salt, lemon juice, and a little ketchup.

  4. Let the sauce stew until it looks rich and thick.

  5. Serve the sauce.

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. Endive + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together284 recipes

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

  2. Asparagus + endivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together33 recipes

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

  3. Asparagus + lettucetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together313 recipes

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

  4. Asparagus + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together704 recipes

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

  5. Endive + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together108 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Rolled in flour, it thickens the sauce and adds richness.
Endive
Stewed until tender, it softens and contributes body and mild bitterness to the sauce.
Young lettuce
Stewed until tender, it adds vegetable body and moisture to the sauce.
Lemon
Its juice adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening with butter and flour. Flour must be cooked in the hot liquid long enough to lose its raw taste and to thicken smoothly. Stewing the sauce afterward lets the starch fully swell and gives a rich, thick texture without lumps.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (asparagus, endive, lettuce, butter, lemon, ketchup):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against asparagus, endive, lettuce, butter, lemon, ketchup. 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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