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Salad

Spinach Salad

A chilled spinach salad with cold boiled tongue, hard‑boiled eggs, lemon juice, butter, salt, pepper, and mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Spinach Salad

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 Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Cook the spinach, then drain and chop it finely.

  2. Season the spinach with salt, pepper, lemon juice, and butter.

  3. Pack the mixture into slightly buttered molds and chill.

Serve

  1. Arrange the chilled spinach on a circle of cold tongue and lettuce leaves, garnished with hard-boiled eggs.

  2. Serve with mayonnaise.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 salad and holds the molded shape once chilled.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the chopped spinach.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the spinach.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add protein-set texture and a mild, creamy flavour as garnish.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and creaminess to contrast with the chilled spinach.

The step that matters

Pack the mixture into slightly buttered molds and chill. Chilling lets the cooked, chopped spinach firm up and hold its shape when turned out. Packing it firmly removes air pockets so the mold releases cleanly.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Asparagusfits about as well
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Spinachthe original
  4. Shallotfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, lemon, butter, egg. 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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