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Lettuce and Peas

A simple cooked dish of lettuce, peas, butter, stock, sugar, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Peas and lettuce 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 ↓

Lettuce and Peas

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove outer leaves from the lettuce, wash, and soak in cold salted water for 2 hours.

  2. Drain and chop the lettuce coarsely.

Cook

  1. In a saucepan, combine the chopped lettuce, butter, green peas, stock, sugar, salt, and pepper.

  2. Cover and simmer gently for about 30 minutes or until the peas are soft.

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. Peas + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,293 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

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

  3. Flour + lettucetop 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

Green peas
Provide the main body and sweet, starchy bulk of the dish.
Lettuce
Adds moisture and softens into a tender, silky texture as it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, rounding out the flavor and mouthfeel.
Stock
Supplies the cooking liquid and savory flavor that the vegetables absorb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the slightly bitter notes of the lettuce.

The step that matters

Simmer gently with the lid on. Gentle, covered simmering cooks the peas and lettuce evenly and keeps the liquid from reducing too fast. A hard boil breaks the vegetables down unevenly, leaving some mushy and others firm.

Swap the peas

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

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

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