Skip to main content
Side

Spinach

Spinach cooked in boiling water, pressed through a sieve, then seasoned with butter, pepper, salt and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Spinach

Ingredients

Directions

Cook and drain

  1. Cook the spinach in boiling water for 20 to 30 minutes until tender, stirring frequently.

  2. Drain the spinach in a fine wire sieve, pressing out excess water with a wooden spoon.

  3. Rub the spinach through the sieve onto a clean, dry plate.

Season and serve

  1. Return the spinach to a saucepan, add butter, pepper, and salt if needed, and heat until hot.

  2. Add a squeeze of lemon juice and cream if desired, but do not make it too moist.

  3. Arrange the spinach in a pyramid shape on a hot dish, marking the sides with a fork.

  4. Garnish the base with small sippets of toast or fried bread.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Spinach + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

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

  3. Spinach + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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 dish and, once cooked and pressed, gives its soft, smooth texture.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel as it melts into the warm spinach.
Lemon juice
Adds a little acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich, mild spinach.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother texture when used, optional in this dish.

The step that matters

Rub the spinach through the sieve and keep it dry. Pressing cooked spinach through a sieve breaks down the leaf fibres into a smooth purée. Excess water left in the spinach dilutes the butter and seasoning and makes the dish watery, so it should be well drained and not overly moist when served.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Coconutfits less well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, butter, pepper, cream, bread. 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.

You might also like

Eggplant CakesEggplant Cakes34 recipesEscalloped Tomatoes (Scalloped Tomatoes)Escalloped Tomatoes (Scalloped Tomatoes)25 recipesParsnip CroquettesParsnip Croquettes12 recipesOnion PuddingOnion Pudding9 recipes