Name: Invalid Broth
Ingredients: 1 heart of lettuce, chopped; 1 bunch of sweet herbs; 1½ pints boiling water; 1 oz butter; 1 tablespoon Bovril

Why it works: Lettuce and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,287 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Invalid Broth

Ingredients

Directions

Chop the heart of a lettuce and place it in a pot with a bunch of sweet herbs.
Pour 1½ pints of boiling water over the ingredients and let the broth simmer for 1 hour.
Remove the herbs, then add 1 oz of butter and 1 tablespoon of Bovril to the broth.
Serve with or without the lettuce.

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.

Lettuce + buttertop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,287 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

Lettuce heart: Provides the vegetable flavour and body of the broth as it simmers.
Butter: Adds richness and a rounder mouthfeel to the finished broth.
Bovril: Adds concentrated savoury, meaty flavour and salt to the broth.

“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.