Skip to main content
Main

Endive, Stewed

A dish of boiled endive served in a butter and cream sauce seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Endive, Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the endive

  1. Remove the outer green leaves from the endive heads.

  2. Soak the endive in salted water to dislodge insects, then drain.

  3. Boil the endive in slightly salted water for 25 minutes.

Stew

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Squeeze the endive dry and add it to the pan with salt, pepper, and cream.

  3. Heat thoroughly, stirring the contents of the pan.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Endive + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together308 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

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

  4. Pepper + creamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Endive + buttertop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together204 recipes

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

Pepper and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 21,449 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

Endive
Forms the body of the dish and softens into a tender, mellow texture when boiled and stewed.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor and giving the stewed endive a smooth mouthfeel.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, thickening the pan liquid into a silky sauce as it heats.

The step that matters

Squeeze the endive dry. Boiled endive holds a lot of water. Leaving it wet would dilute the cream and keep the sauce thin and watery instead of coating the leaves.

Swap the endive

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Endivethe original

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

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes