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Dessert

Laitues Farcies. — Stuffed Lettuces

A dish of cabbage lettuces stuffed with seasoned forcemeat, battered, breaded, and fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 622 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Laitues Farcies. — Stuffed Lettuces

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lettuces

  1. Boil the lettuces for 15 minutes, then transfer to cold water and squeeze them dry.

  2. Gently separate the leaves without detaching them and fill the center with seasoned forcemeat.

  3. Cover the forcemeat with the leaves and tie each lettuce securely.

Cook

  1. Stew the stuffed lettuces in a braising method until cooked through.

  2. Dry the cooked lettuces with a linen cloth.

Coat and fry

  1. Prepare a batter with flour, white wine, oil, and salt, or beat an egg.

  2. Dip the lettuces in the batter or egg, then coat with grated bread.

  3. Fry the lettuces until golden brown.

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. Cabbage + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together622 recipes

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

  2. Lettuce + flourtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,236 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Lettuce + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. White wine + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together827 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Cabbage + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together978 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cabbage lettuces
Leaves wrap and hold the forcemeat together as a tender outer shell.
Forcemeat
Seasoned filling that supplies the main body and flavor inside each lettuce.
Flour
Forms the base of the batter that helps the coating adhere to the lettuces.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the batter, lightly balancing the rich filling.
Grated bread
Creates a crisp, golden crust during frying through browning.

The step that matters

Fry the lettuces until golden brown. Browning builds the crisp crust and flavor on the outside, while the stuffed lettuces are already cooked through, so overlong frying can dry the coating and overheat the filling.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, flour, white wine, bread):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, flour, white wine, bread. 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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