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Stewed Endive

A dish of boiled endive simmered in stock, seasoned, and served with toast or fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Stewed Endive

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the endive

  1. Cut off all the green parts from the endive and wash thoroughly.

  2. Boil the endive in salted water for 20 minutes, then plunge into cold water until cool.

  3. Drain and wipe the endive with a cloth, then chop it up.

Make the stew

  1. In a saucepan, melt a little butter and add the chopped endive.

  2. Season the endive with salt and pepper.

  3. Mix in a little flour.

  4. Pour in enough stock to moisten.

  5. Boil until the liquid is reduced, then turn out onto a dish.

Serve

  1. Serve with pieces of toast or fried bread for garnish.

  2. Optionally add a little butter and cream 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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Endive + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together39 recipes

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

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
Forms the bulk of the stew and provides its main vegetable flavour and texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour when the endive is gently cooked.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid so the stew becomes lightly body-rich rather than watery.
Stock
Supplies the moistening liquid that cooks the endive and forms the stew's base flavour.

The step that matters

Boil until the liquid is reduced. Reducing the stock concentrates its flavour and lets the flour thicken it properly. Stopping too early leaves a thin, watery stew, while over-reducing can make it pasty or too salty.

Swap the endive

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Endivethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, bread, cream. 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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