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Spinach and Chicoey

A preserved vegetable dish made by blanching spinach and chicory, mincing, packing into bottles, and boiling in a water bath.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and chicory share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Spinach and Chicoey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Gather and clean the spinach and chicory.

  2. Blanch the vegetables in boiling water with a little coarse sea salt.

  3. Cool and press the vegetables, then mince them.

Pack and process

  1. Pack the minced vegetables into bottles.

  2. Boil the bottles in a water bath for 15 minutes.

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 + chicorytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together20 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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 preserve and gives it its green color and earthy flavor.
Chicory
Adds a slightly bitter flavor that balances the sweetness of the greens.

The step that matters

Pressing the blanched vegetables. Blanching softens the leaves and sets their color, but excess water left in them dilutes the preserve and can weaken its texture. Pressing out the water before mincing keeps the mixture dense and firm.

“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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