Name: Endives, with Cream Sauce
Ingredients: 6 young and tender heads of endives; 4 ounces of butter; Salt to taste; Pepper to taste; Nutmeg to taste; 4 tablespoons of cream sauce; Toasted bread for serving

Why it works: Endive and nutmeg share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 47 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Endives, with Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Trim the outer hard layers of the endives, cut off the roots, and wash them in cold water.
Separate the leaves to remove any small worms, then drain and press them dry.
Chop the endives finely on a chopping board.

Cook

Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat, then add the chopped endives.
Stir the endives for a few minutes, then season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.
Add the cream sauce and mix well until warmed through.

Serve

Serve with small pieces of toasted bread around the dish.

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.

Endive + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together47 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together13,015 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,516 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,787 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Endives: Form the main bulk of the dish, softening into a tender, moist base.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, carrying the flavour of the endives and seasonings.
Cream sauce: Adds moisture and creaminess, binding the chopped endives together.

Swap the endive

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

Capsicumfits better
Spinachfits better
Shallotfits better
Endivethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, nutmeg, cream, sauce, bread. 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.