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Salad

Spinach Salad

Spinach salad made with boiled tongue, seasoned with lemon, butter, salt, pepper, and served with tartar sauce.

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

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Spinach Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Pick over and wash the spinach.

  2. Cook the spinach until tender, then drain and chop finely.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice, then add melted butter.

Mold and chill

  1. Butter small tin molds and pack the spinach mixture solidly into them.

  2. Chill the molds until set, then remove the spinach from the molds.

Arrange and serve

  1. Arrange the spinach on thin slices of cold boiled tongue cut into circular pieces.

  2. Garnish each serving with a wreath of parsley and serve with tartar sauce.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  4. Spinach + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

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

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

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

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 packed and chilled, holds its shape as a molded mass.
Melted butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the chopped spinach.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the spinach.

The step that matters

Packing the spinach mixture solidly into the molds. Spinach holds air and water between its chopped pieces. Firm, even packing removes air pockets and helps the mixture set into a unified shape that releases cleanly after chilling.

Swap the spinach

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

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

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