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Endive with Gravy

A dish of blanched endive simmered in gravy, seasoned with salt, sugar, and reduced Spanish sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,147 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Endive with Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the endive

  1. Wash and clean the endive, removing any worms found in the heart.

  2. Trim off the green parts of the leaves and wash the endive in 2-3 changes of water.

  3. Blanch the endive to remove the bitter taste, then plunge into cold water.

  4. Squeeze out all excess water and chop the endive finely.

Stew and finish

  1. Stew the chopped endive in enough gravy to cover it completely.

  2. Add salt and sugar to balance the bitterness, and check for tenderness by squeezing a bit between your fingers.

  3. Once tender, stir in the reduced Spanish sauce and serve as a side dish or under poached 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. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Endive + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together129 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Endive + sugartop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together116 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Endive
Forms the main body of the dish and, once stewed, becomes soft and tender.
Gravy
Provides moisture and savoury flavour as the endive stews.
Spanish sauce
Adds depth and richness to the finished dish when stirred in at the end.
Sugar
Sweetness that balances the endive's natural bitterness.

The step that matters

Blanching the endive. Blanching in boiling water draws out much of the bitter compounds in endive. Plunging it into cold water stops the cooking so the leaves stay firm rather than turning mushy.

Swap the endive

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Endivethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, sauce. 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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