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Endive, Stewed

A dish of boiled endive simmered in butter, flour, stock, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Endive, Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the endive

  1. Wash the endive thoroughly to remove any insects and discard the green parts of the leaves.

  2. Place the endive in boiling salted water and cook for 10 minutes.

  3. Remove the endive, drain, and chop it finely.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan, stir in the flour, and cook for a few minutes without browning.

  2. Add the stock and stir until boiling.

  3. Incorporate the chopped endive and lemon juice, season with salt and pepper, and simmer until the endive is tender.

  4. Serve 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Endive + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together111 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Endive + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together108 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Endive
Is the main vegetable, becoming tender and mild after boiling and simmering.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps form the base of the sauce with the flour.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce when cooked briefly in the melted butter.
Stock
Provides the liquid that becomes the sauce and carries savoury flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the stewed endive.

The step that matters

Cook the flour in the butter without browning. Cooking the flour briefly in butter removes its raw taste and starch-thickening power is then used evenly; browning would change the colour and flavour of the sauce.

Swap the endive

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Endivethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, lemon, pepper. 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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