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Dandelions, As Greens

A sautéed vegetable dish made from dandelion tops, cooked with salt, pepper, butter or pork fat, and optionally topped with hard‑boiled egg slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Dandelion and pepper work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77 recipes. Both carry 2-heptenal, which smells green. The science ↓

Dandelions, As Greens

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Gather dandelion tops and wash them well.

  2. Boil enough salted water to cover the dandelions.

  3. Add the dandelions to the boiling water and cook until tender.

  4. Squeeze out all the water from the dandelions.

Sauté and serve

  1. In a frying pan, fry the dandelions with a little salt, pepper, and butter or pork fat for a few minutes.

  2. If available, add slices of hard-boiled eggs before serving.

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. Dandelion + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together77 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptenal (green).

  2. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Dandelion + buttertop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Dandelion + eggtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together51 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptenal (green).

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

What each ingredient does

Dandelion tops
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender when boiled and then sautéed.
Butter or pork fat
Adds richness and flavour as the greens fry, and helps them brown lightly.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add soft, mild richness that balances the slightly bitter greens.

The step that matters

Squeeze out all the water from the dandelions. Leftover water dilutes the fat and stops the greens from frying; they steam instead of sautéing and can taste watery. Removing it lets the fat coat the leaves and gives them a better texture.

“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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