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Spinach for Garnishing

A buttery spinach garnish made with stock and nutmeg, served with beef or veal.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 603 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Spinach for Garnishing

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Wash spinach.

  2. Cook ½ peck of spinach in boiling water with salt for 5 minutes.

  3. Transfer spinach to cold water to preserve color.

  4. Drain spinach and press out water.

  5. Chop spinach finely.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt 1 tablespoon of butter.

  2. Sprinkle in 1 tablespoon of flour and stir for 5 minutes.

  3. Add ½ teaspoon of salt and ½ pint of stock.

  4. Stir until boiling.

  5. Grate nutmeg into the mixture.

  6. Remove from heat and stir in 2 tablespoons of extra butter.

Serve

  1. Serve as a garnish for spiced beef, beef a la mode, or fricandeau of veal.

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. Spinach + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together603 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Spinach + flourtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,564 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. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

Spinach
Forms the bulk of the garnish, providing its green color and soft, leafy texture.
Butter
Enriches the sauce, adding fat for a smooth, rich mouthfeel.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce when cooked briefly with melted butter.
Stock
Supplies the liquid that the flour thickens into the sauce.

The step that matters

Transfer spinach to cold water. Chilling the spinach quickly after boiling helps it keep a bright green color by stopping the cooking and halting further color change.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

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