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Boiled Lettuce

Boiled lettuce is a simple dish of blanched lettuce seasoned with butter and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,037 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Boiled Lettuce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the lettuce thoroughly and soak in cold water for 10 minutes.

  2. Drain the water and place the lettuce in a pan of boiling water with salt.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook rapidly for 20 minutes, removing any scum that forms.

  2. Drain thoroughly, chop finely, and add butter and pepper.

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

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

  2. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  3. 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
Is the main vegetable; cooking softens its leaves until they become tender and easy to chop.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the cooked lettuce.

The step that matters

Drain thoroughly. Lettuce holds a lot of water after boiling. Leaving it wet dilutes the butter and pepper and makes the dish watery, so squeeze or press out as much liquid as you can before chopping.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper. 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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