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Spinach Without Water

A sautéed spinach dish cooked with butter, salt, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 Without Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and drain the spinach thoroughly.

  2. Cut the spinach into coarse pieces.

Cook

  1. Heat the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the spinach, salt, and grated nutmeg.

  3. Cook over high heat until the spinach is tender.

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 + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together603 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Spinach + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,583 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh spinach
Forms the bulk of the dish and wilts down into a tender, moist green base.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and helps the spinach cook smoothly without sticking.

The step that matters

Cook over high heat until the spinach is tender. Spinach is mostly water and releases it quickly. High heat drives off that liquid fast so the leaves saute rather than stew and turn grey and soggy.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, nutmeg. 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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