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Endives with Veal Gravy

A dish of coarsely chopped endives simmered in veal gravy, finished with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Endive and nutmeg share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 47 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Endives with Veal Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and cook until light brown, stirring constantly.

  3. Add the coarsely chopped endives and season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

  4. Mix well and slowly add the veal gravy.

Serve

  1. Add a piece of butter 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. Endive + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together47 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Flour + endivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together111 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melts to form the fat base that carries the flour and flavours the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with the butter, giving it body.
Endives
Provide the main vegetable and a slightly bitter flavour that the rich sauce balances.
Veal gravy
Supplies the liquid and savoury meat flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour until light brown. Cooking the flour in butter, stirred constantly, cooks out its raw taste and thickens the sauce evenly. Stopping too early leaves a pasty flavour, while over-browning makes it bitter and darker.

Swap the endive

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, nutmeg, veal. 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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