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Stewed Peas with Lettuce

A stew of young peas, butter, shredded lettuce, herbs, sugar, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and chive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 261 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Stewed Peas with Lettuce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the peas until tender, then strain them.

Stew

  1. In a stew pan, combine the peas with butter, shredded lettuce, chives, parsley, sugar, salt, pepper, and mint.

  2. Cover and simmer gently for 10 minutes.

  3. Mix flour with fresh butter, then add to the peas and stir over heat for a few seconds.

Serve

  1. Serve garnished with fleurons or croutons.

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. Lettuce + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together261 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Chive + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Cabbage + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together622 recipes

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

  5. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Young peas
Form the main body of the dish and give it its tender, sweet flavour.
Lettuce
Adds moisture and softens into the peas as they stew.
Flour
Mixed with butter and stirred in, it thickens the cooking liquid into a light sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the stewed peas.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour and butter. Adding the flour-butter mixture to the hot peas and stirring briefly lets the starch thicken the liquid evenly. Too little stirring leaves lumps, while overcooking can make the sauce pasty.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, cabbage, lettuce, chive, parsley, sugar, pepper):

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Beansfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, cabbage, lettuce, chive, parsley, sugar, 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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