Skip to main content
Main

Endive, Boiled

A simple boiled endive dish seasoned with butter, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Endive and pepper work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 308 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Endive, Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the endive heads well.

  2. Strip off the outer leaves and cut the stalks to separate the leaves.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the endive in water until tender.

  2. Drain and serve with a little butter, salt, and pepper.

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

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

  3. Endive + buttertop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together204 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Endive
The main vegetable; boiling softens its leaves until they are tender enough to eat.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth fat coating to the warm, cooked leaves.

The step that matters

Boil until just tender. Boiling too long turns the leaves soft and watery, while stopping too early leaves the stalk bases firm and fibrous. Check the thickest part with a knife tip before draining.

Swap the endive

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes