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Chartreuse of Vegetables

A baked vegetable stew made with carrots, turnips, onions, spinach, cauliflower, asparagus, bacon, broth, and brown roux.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and cauliflower match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 286 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Chartreuse of Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Blanch the carrots and turnips.

  2. Boil the button onions until tender.

  3. Chop the spinach, and prepare the cauliflower and asparagus.

Line and fill the mold

  1. Line a mold with slices of bacon.

  2. Arrange the roots around the bottom and sides of the mold in a pattern.

  3. Press the spinach over the roots.

  4. Fill the mold with chopped vegetables stewed in broth, thickened with brown roux, and seasoned with salt and pepper.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the mold in a bain marie and boil for one hour, or bake for the same time.

  2. Serve with a brown sauce.

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. Turnip + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together286 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cauliflower + asparagustop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together163 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Spinach + asparagustop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together274 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  5. Turnip + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together320 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Form the colourful patterned layer and add sweetness and body to the vegetable filling.
Turnips
Add structure to the patterned layer and a mild, slightly sweet flavour.
Spinach
Forms a green layer over the roots and adds moisture and earthy flavour.
Brown roux
Thickens the broth so the stewed vegetable filling holds together when unmoulded.
Fat bacon
Lines the mold, adding fat and savoury flavour to the outside of the dish.

The step that matters

Packing the mold. Arranging the roots and pressing the spinach firmly creates the layered pattern and removes gaps. Without this, the filling can collapse or leak when the chartreuse is turned out after cooking.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, spinach, cauliflower, asparagus, pepper):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Broccolifits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, spinach, cauliflower, asparagus, 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.

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