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Dandelion, Stewed

A stew of dandelion and sorrel leaves cooked with butter, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Dandelion and sorrel share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Dandelion, Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Gather fresh dandelion and sorrel leaves, removing withered tips and hard root parts.

  2. Shred the leaves into fine strips.

  3. Wash the shredded leaves to remove grit.

Stew and finish

  1. In a copper stewpan, add the dandelion leaves and cover with a small amount of boiling water.

  2. Stew until nearly tender.

  3. Add the sorrel leaves.

  4. Simmer until the water evaporates and the mixture is soft.

  5. Mash with a wooden spoon.

  6. Stir in the butter.

  7. Season with pepper and salt.

  8. Serve like spinach, garnished with hard-boiled eggs, fried bread sippets, or shaped boiled carrots.

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. Dandelion + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sorrel + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together419 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Dandelion + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together77 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptenal (green).

  4. Sorrel + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together652 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Dandelion leaves
Form the bulk of the dish and, once softened, give it its body and slightly bitter flavour.
Sorrel leaves
Add a sharp, acidic note that brightens the mild, bitter greens.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky moisture to the mashed greens.

The step that matters

Simmer until the water evaporates and the mixture is soft. Too much water left in the pan makes the greens soggy and diluted, while cooking too briefly leaves tough fibres. Slow stewing softens the cell walls so the leaves mash smoothly.

“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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