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Endives with Veal Gravy

A dish of chopped endives simmered in veal gravy with butter, flour, salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,015 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Endives with Veal Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the endives as in recipe No. 699 and chop them coarsely.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour to the melted butter and cook until light brown, stirring constantly.

  3. Add the chopped endives to the saucepan and season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

  4. Slowly mix in the veal gravy and heat through.

  5. Add a piece of butter 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. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Butter
Enriches the flavour and forms the base of the roux that thickens the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter into a roux.
Veal gravy
Provides the liquid and savoury meaty flavour of the sauce.
Endives (in the method)
Form the main vegetable and are softened by the warm sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the butter. The butter and flour must be stirred constantly until lightly browned; cooking the roux long enough removes raw starch taste, while stopping too early leaves the sauce pasty and floury, and overheating burns it.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Sagefits about as well
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Nutmegthe original

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