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Lettuce, Boiled

A dish of boiled lettuce served in a white sauce with egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,015 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Lettuce, Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lettuce

  1. Wash the lettuce thoroughly and cut away the thick stalks, keeping all the sound leaves.

  2. Boil the lettuce in plenty of salted water for 10 to 15 minutes.

  3. Transfer the lettuce to cold water for 1 minute, then strain and chop lightly.

Make the sauce and finish

  1. In a saucepan, combine the chopped lettuce with 1 pint of white sauce.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg, then simmer gently until hot.

  3. Remove the saucepan from heat and stir in the well-beaten yolks of 2 eggs.

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 + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Nutmeg + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together24,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Lettuce + saucetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Nutmeg and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 24,744 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

Lettuce
Forms the bulk of the dish and, once boiled, becomes tender and soft.
White sauce
Provides a creamy, moist base that coats the chopped lettuce.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce gently when stirred in off the heat, adding richness.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolks off the heat. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat. If the sauce is still boiling when they go in, the yolks can scramble and turn grainy, so remove the pan from heat first and stir steadily.

Swap the lettuce

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, pepper, nutmeg, egg. 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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