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Asparagus

A stew of asparagus, endive, lettuce, and chives cooked in butter and flour, finished with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Endive and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 284 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Asparagus

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scrape the asparagus clean and soak in cold water.

  2. Cut off the edible portion of the asparagus.

  3. Chop the endive, lettuce, and chives.

Make the stew

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter and add the chopped vegetables.

  2. Dredge in a little flour and season with pepper and salt.

  3. Pour in the gravy and stew until the sauce is rich and thick.

  4. Serve hot.

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 + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together284 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Endive + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together61 recipes

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

  3. Lettuce + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together261 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Asparagus + endivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together33 recipes

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

  5. Asparagus + chivetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together165 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Asparagus
Forms the main body of the stew and gives its vegetable flavour.
Butter
Cooks the vegetables gently and adds richness to the finished sauce.
Flour
Dusted over the vegetables, it thickens the sauce as it stews.
Gravy
Forms the liquid base of the stew, which reduces into a thick sauce.

The step that matters

Stewing until the sauce is thick. Flour thickens only as the liquid simmers and its starch swells, so stopping early leaves the sauce thin and underdeveloped.

Swap the asparagus

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Asparagusthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against endive, lettuce, chive, butter, flour, 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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