Skip to main content
Main

Endive

A dish of boiled endive sautéed with butter and flour, finished with broth, gravy, or cream.

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

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 ↓

Endive

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the endive

  1. Remove the green leaves from the endive, keeping only the tender parts.

  2. Wash the endive in several waters and plunge it into salted boiling water.

  3. Drain the cooked endive in a colander, then press out the moisture.

Cook in the stewpan

  1. Chop the endive and place it in a stewpan with butter, frying for a few minutes while stirring.

  2. Sprinkle the flour over the endive, season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

  3. Gradually moisten with broth, gravy, or cream, and cook for 15 minutes, stirring often.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Endive + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together111 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

White endive
Forms the bulk of the dish and gives its tender, slightly bitter flavor.
Butter
Adds fat and richness while the endive fries, helping it brown lightly.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth sauce as it is moistened.
Broth, gravy, or cream
Supplies the liquid that turns the endive into a moist, saucy dish.

The step that matters

Pressing out the moisture after boiling. Endive holds a lot of water. If it is not well drained and pressed, the extra liquid dilutes the butter and flour, so the sauce turns thin instead of thickening properly.

Swap the endive

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

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

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