Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Lettuce

Boiled lettuce is cooked, drained, chopped, and sautéed with butter, salt, pepper, optionally finished with white sauce, nutmeg, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Boiled Lettuce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lettuce

  1. Wash the lettuce and remove thick, bitter stalks, keeping all sound leaves.

  2. Cook the lettuce in plenty of boiling salted water for 10 to 15 minutes.

  3. Blanch the cooked lettuce in cold water for 1 to 2 minutes.

  4. Drain and chop the lettuce lightly.

Finish the lettuce

  1. Heat the chopped lettuce in a stewpan with butter, salt, and pepper to taste.

  2. For a variation, heat the chopped lettuce with 1 pint of white sauce seasoned with salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg.

  3. After simmering in the sauce for a few minutes, remove from heat and stir in the well-beaten yolks of 2 eggs.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lettuce + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

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

  4. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Lettuce
Forms the body of the dish, becoming soft and tender when boiled and chopped.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the chopped lettuce.
White sauce
Adds creaminess and moisture for the optional variation.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce gently as they set with heat, giving a richer texture.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken and can curdle if they get too hot. Removing the pan from the heat before stirring them in lets them thicken smoothly into the sauce.

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, butter, pepper, sauce, egg):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, butter, pepper, sauce, egg. 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.

You might also like

Creamy Lettuce SoupCreamy Lettuce Soup8 recipesLettuce SoupLettuce Soup8 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes