Skip to main content
Main

Peas, Stewed, and Lettuce

A stew of peas and lettuce cooked with gravy, butter, flour, sugar, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lettuce and peas match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,293 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Peas, Stewed, and Lettuce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and remove the outer leaves from the lettuces.

  2. Soak the lettuces in cold water for 2 hours.

  3. Slice the lettuces into fine strips.

Make the stew

  1. In a saucepan, combine the sliced lettuces, peas, gravy, and butter mixed with flour, sugar, pepper, and salt.

  2. Cover the saucepan and stew until the peas are tender.

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. Lettuce + peastop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,293 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

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

  3. Lettuce + flourtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,236 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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Lettuces
Form the body of the stew and soften into a tender, moist base as they cook.
Peas
Add body and gentle sweetness, becoming tender during the stewing.
Gravy
Supplies savoury liquid and moisture for the stew.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour through the stew.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth, lightly bodied sauce.
Castor sugar
Adds mild sweetness that balances the savoury gravy and vegetables.

The step that matters

Mixing the butter with the flour. Flour blended into butter disperses evenly before it meets the hot liquid. This helps it thicken the stew smoothly instead of forming lumps that stay in the sauce.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Cashew nutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, butter, flour, sugar, pepper. 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

Green PeasGreen Peas229 recipesGreen Peas SoupGreen Peas Soup35 recipesCreamy Lettuce SoupCreamy Lettuce Soup8 recipesLettuce SoupLettuce Soup8 recipes