Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Leeks

Stewed leeks simmered in stock, finished with butter, flour, lemon juice, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Stewed Leeks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the leeks

  1. Cut off the roots and green tops of the leeks.

  2. Wash the leeks well.

Stew the leeks

  1. Place the leeks in a saucepan with the stock and stew gently until soft.

  2. Remove the leeks from the saucepan.

  3. Place the leeks on a hot dish.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In another saucepan, melt the butter.

  2. Stir in the flour and mix well.

  3. Strain the mixture into the stock.

  4. Stir until it boils.

  5. Season with pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

  6. Pour the sauce over the leeks.

  7. Serve.

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. Leek + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together162 recipes

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

  3. Leek + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together328 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Leek + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together965 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Leeks
Main vegetable, becomes soft and tender as it stews in the stock.
Stock
Liquid that cooks the leeks and forms the base of the sauce.
Butter
Fat that melts with the flour to start the sauce base.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce when cooked with butter.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour and mix well. Flour must be fully mixed into the melted butter and then into the liquid without lumps. Cooking the butter and flour together, then stirring until it boils, lets the starch swell evenly and thicken the sauce smoothly.

Swap the leek

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits about as well
  3. Okrafits about as well
  4. Leekthe original

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

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesLeek SoupLeek Soup31 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes