Skip to main content
Main

Lettuce, Braised Plainly

Braised lettuce cooked with butter, water, sugar, salt, pepper, lemon juice, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Lettuce, Braised Plainly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Reserve the hearts of the lettuces for salads and divide the rest into leaves.

Braise

  1. Pack the leaves closely in a saucepan with 1 tablespoon of butter at the bottom and 1 tablespoon on top.

  2. Pour ¼ cup of water over the leaves, add 1 teaspoon of sugar and ¼ teaspoon of salt.

  3. Cook for at least 40 minutes until done.

  4. Press the lettuces to let the liquid run into the pan.

  5. Chop them up.

Finish the sauce

  1. Add 1 tablespoon of flour to the liquid in the pan and stir.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice to taste.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Lettuce + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

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

  3. Lettuce + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,559 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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

Lettuces
Form the bulk of the dish, softening as they braise into a tender mass.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour through the leaves as they cook.
Sugar
Adds a touch of sweetness that balances the lettuce's natural bitterness.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a light sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the lettuce until done. Lettuce needs a long, gentle braise to turn soft and tender; stopping early leaves it tough and watery, so the full 40 minutes or more matters.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Lettucethe original

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

More braised lettuce recipes

Spanish 4 See all 2 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCreamy Lettuce SoupCreamy Lettuce Soup8 recipesLettuce SoupLettuce Soup8 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes