Skip to main content
Main

Stuffed Lettuce

Stuffed lettuce filled with savory mince and egg, braised in soup, vegetables, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lettuce and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,301 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Stuffed Lettuce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lettuce

  1. Wash the lettuce and trim off the outside leaves.

  2. Tie the lettuce with tape and blanch in boiling water for a few minutes.

  3. Allow the lettuce to drain and cool.

  4. Split each lettuce down one side and carefully remove a small portion of the heart.

Stuff and braise

  1. Stuff the lettuce with the savory mince bound with the egg.

  2. Bring the severed edges of the leaves together and tie them up again.

  3. Braise gently with soup, vegetables, and stock for one hour.

Serve

  1. Serve with the thickened stock poured over the stuffed lettuce.

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 + eggtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce
Forms the outer leaves that wrap and hold the filling during braising.
Egg
Binds the savory mince so it holds together when stuffed and cooked.
Stock
Provides liquid for gentle braising, flavouring the lettuce and thickening into the serving sauce.

The step that matters

Braise gently. Gentle heat keeps the lettuce tender and the bound mince set without boiling it apart. Vigorous boiling could loosen the ties and break up the filling.

“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