Name: Spinach
Ingredients: 2 buckets of water; spinach; coarse sea salt; butter; cream (optional); nutmeg (optional); lemon juice (optional); hard-boiled eggs or poached eggs (optional)

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

Ingredients

Directions

Wash the spinach in one bucket of water, allowing dirt to settle at the bottom.
Lift the spinach into the second bucket after a few minutes.
If stalks are large, pick the spinach and place it in boiling salted water.
Boil the spinach for about 15 minutes until tender, then drain.
Chop the spinach finely in a basin with a knife and fork.
Return the chopped spinach to a saucepan with a little butter to heat through.
Serve the spinach in a vegetable dish, optionally topped with hard-boiled or poached eggs, and add cream, nutmeg, and lemon juice if desired.

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.

Spinach + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together603 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together11,318 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Spinach + lemontop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,109 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,516 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Cream + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,920 recipes

Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (spinach, butter, cream, lemon, egg):

Nutmegthe original
Parsleyfits about as well
Tarragonfits about as well
Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, butter, cream, lemon, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.