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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: Lettuce and milk work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and 410 recipes mention both. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: egg, milk (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Lettuce + milktop 17% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together410 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together34,118 recipes

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

  4. Butter + milktop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together81,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Pepper + carrottop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together14,555 recipes

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

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.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

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

  1. Potatobetter flavor fit
  2. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  3. Parsnipbetter flavor fit
  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. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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