Name: Consomme Deslignac
Ingredients: 2 small lettuces, stuffed and rolled into sausage form; 1 quart boiling consommé; 2 tablespoons poached tapioca; a pinch of chervil

Why it works: Lettuce and chervil match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 396 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Consomme Deslignac

Ingredients

2 small lettuces, stuffed and rolled into sausage form
1 quart boiling consommé
2 tablespoons poached tapioca
a pinch of chervil

Directions

Prepare

Poach the stuffed lettuces until cooked.
Prepare the consommé and bring it to a boil.
Cut the poached tapioca into small dice.
Trim the lettuce and slice it.

Serve

Place the lettuce slices and diced tapioca in a soup tureen.
Pour the boiling consommé over the garnish.
Thicken the soup with poached tapioca and add chervil.

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.

Lettuce + cherviltop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together396 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

Stuffed lettuces: Hold the filling in a tender, rolled shape once poached.
Consommé: Forms the clear, flavourful broth that the other ingredients sit in.
Poached tapioca: Swells and adds body and a soft, chewy texture to the soup.

“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.