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Lettuce with Cream

A warm lettuce dish cooked with butter, flour, cream, and seasoned, garnished with hard‑boiled eggs and toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Lettuce with Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lettuce

  1. Trim off the outer leaves of the lettuce and wash the heads in cold water several times.

  2. Put the lettuce in a saucepan with boiling water lightly salted and cook for 10 minutes.

  3. Immerse the lettuce in cold water, drain in a colander, and press dry with your hands.

  4. Chop the lettuce finely.

Make the cream sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter, then add the flour and cook until light brown.

  2. Add the chopped lettuce, stirring well, and season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

  3. Slowly add the cream and let it cook for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Before serving, garnish with quartered hard‑boiled eggs and toasted bread cut in fancy shapes.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lettuce + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together184 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

Lettuce
Forms the bulk of the dish, becoming soft and tender after cooking and pressing.
Butter
Provides fat and richness, and with the flour forms the base of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and cream into a smooth sauce that coats the lettuce.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, giving the lettuce a creamy, smooth texture.
Nutmeg
Adds a warm, aromatic note that complements the cream and lettuce.

The step that matters

Cooking the butter and flour. Cooking the flour in melted butter until light brown removes its raw taste and allows it to thicken the cream evenly; adding cream too early can leave lumps.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, nutmeg, cream, egg, 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.

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