Skip to main content
Main

Steamed Lettuce

A simple dish of steamed lettuce served with pepper, coarse sea salt, and sauce piquante.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lettuce and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,037 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Steamed Lettuce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Separate the lettuce leaves and wash them thoroughly.

Steam

  1. Place the lettuce in a steamer over a kettle of boiling water, or use a colander over a pot of boiling water as a makeshift steamer.

  2. Cover tightly and keep the steam in by placing a thick folded cloth over the lid.

  3. Boil the water vigorously for 30 minutes.

Serve

  1. Remove the wilted lettuce and place it on a hot dish.

  2. Sprinkle with pepper and coarse sea salt, and pour sauce piquante over it.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Pepper + saucetop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,303 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Pepper and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,303 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
Steaming wilts the leaves until they turn soft and tender.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, 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.

You might also like

Creamy Lettuce SoupCreamy Lettuce Soup8 recipesLettuce SoupLettuce Soup8 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes