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Endive, À LA Frangaise

A boiled endive dish flavored with broth, butter, pepper, salt, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Endive and nutmeg share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 47 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Endive, À LA Frangaise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the endive

  1. Wash the endive.

  2. Boil the endive as in the preceding recipe.

  3. Chop the endive rather finely.

Cook and serve

  1. Put the chopped endive into a stewpan with the broth.

  2. Boil over a brisk fire until the sauce is all reduced.

  3. Add the butter, pepper, salt, and a small amount of grated nutmeg, and mix well.

  4. Bring to a boil.

  5. Serve very hot.

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. Endive + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together47 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  3. Endive + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together308 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Endive
Provides the bulk of the dish, softening as it cooks and absorbing the reduced broth.
Broth
Supplies the liquid that reduces to a concentrated, savoury coating for the chopped endive.
Butter
Adds fat that enriches the reduced sauce and gives it a smooth, glossy texture.

The step that matters

Boil over a brisk fire until the sauce is all reduced. Once the broth has evaporated, the endive can scorch and stick to the pan. Reducing concentrates the flavour of the broth, so the timing matters: stop when the liquid is gone but the endive is still moist.

Swap the endive

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, nutmeg):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Endivethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, nutmeg. 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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