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Creamed Endive

Creamed endive is a dish of boiled endive in a milk and flour sauce, seasoned with butter, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Creamed Endive

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the endive

  1. Wash the endive carefully and remove the outer green leaves, leaving only the white part.

  2. Boil the endive until tender, then drain well.

Make the creamed sauce

  1. Return the endive to the kettle and nearly cover it with milk.

  2. When the milk boils, thicken it with flour mixed with cold milk.

  3. Season with butter, salt, and pepper, then serve.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Endive + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together111 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Endive + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together308 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Endive
Provides the main vegetable body and a mildly bitter flavour that the cream sauce softens.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that the flour thickens.
Flour
Thickens the hot milk into a smooth, coating sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening the milk with flour. Flour must be mixed smoothly with cold milk before it goes into the boiling milk. Added dry or lumpy, it clumps instead of dispersing, and the starch only thickens evenly when the mixture is stirred into hot liquid.

Swap the endive

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Endivethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, butter, 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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