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Brussels Sprouts with Cheese Sauce

A dish of boiled Brussels sprouts topped with cheese sauce, croutons, grated cheese, ham, and brown sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cheese and ham work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 303 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

Brussels Sprouts with Cheese Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil and drain the Brussels sprouts.

Assemble

  1. Arrange the sprouts in a dish in circles, leaving one sprout on top.

  2. Pour cheese sauce over the sprouts.

  3. Surround the pile with small croutons, glazed and sprinkled with grated cheese and ham.

  4. Drizzle a little brown sauce over the top.

Serve

  1. 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. Cheese + hamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together303 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  2. Cheese + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,987 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Sauce + hamtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,314 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Brussels sprouts + cheesetop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5 recipes

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

  5. Brussels sprouts + saucetop 45% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Brussels sprouts
Form the main body of the dish and provide its vegetable base.
Cheese sauce
Adds moisture and a rich, creamy coating over the sprouts.
Grated cheese
Melts and browns on the croutons, adding savoury flavour and a golden finish.
Grated ham
Adds salty, savoury flavour to the topping.
Small croutons
Add crisp texture contrasting with the soft sprouts and sauce.

Swap the brussels sprouts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cheese, sauce, ham):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Brussels sproutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cheese, sauce, ham. 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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