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Lettuce Au Jus

A light vegetable dish of boiled lettuce with carrots, onion, parsley, butter, and a creamy egg yolk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Lettuce Au Jus

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the lettuce in slightly salted water for 10 minutes.

  2. Drain and cut open with a knife, then sprinkle with salt and pepper.

  3. Add the sliced carrots, onion, parsley, and butter, then cover with water and cook slowly until the carrots are tender.

  4. Beat the egg yolk with the milk or cream and add just 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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  5. Lettuce + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together976 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce
Forms the main body of the dish and absorbs the flavour of the cooking liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour through the cooking liquid.
Egg yolk
Thickens the sauce gently and gives it a smooth, rich body when added off the heat.
Milk or cream
Adds moisture and richness, mellowing the sauce when combined with the egg yolk.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk mixture. Egg yolk thickens when heated but can scramble if it boils. Adding the beaten yolk and milk or cream just before serving, with the sauce off the heat or at low heat, keeps it smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, pepper, carrot, parsley, butter, egg, milk):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, pepper, carrot, parsley, butter, egg, milk. 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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