Skip to main content
Main

Spinach with Bgg Sauce

Spinach served with a sauce of eggs, butter, vinegar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Spinach and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 503 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Spinach with Bgg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Soak the spinach in cold water for several hours, picking over each leaf carefully.

  2. Wash the spinach in several waters until no sand remains.

  3. Cook the spinach in 1 quart of boiling water with 1 teaspoon of salt for 20 minutes.

  4. Skim out the greens and mound them on a vegetable dish.

Make the egg sauce

  1. In a bowl, mash the yolk of a hard-boiled egg with 1 tablespoon of melted butter, adding salt, cayenne, and mustard.

  2. Beat the raw egg with 1 tablespoon of melted butter or olive oil, then add 2 tablespoons of cider vinegar and the other ingredients.

  3. Cook the mixture over a kettle until slightly thickened, then stir in the finely chopped egg white.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce with the spinach.

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 + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together503 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  4. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 carries the sauce as its main vegetable.
Raw egg
Thickens the sauce as it cooks gently, giving it a creamy, lightly set body.
Hard-boiled egg yolk
Enriches the sauce with a smooth, rich texture when mashed with butter.
Melted butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Cider vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich egg and butter flavours.
Milk
Adds moisture that loosens the sauce to a pourable consistency.

The step that matters

Cooking the egg sauce until slightly thickened. Egg proteins set with gentle heat and can curdle or scramble if overheated, so the sauce should be cooked slowly and stirred until it just thickens.

Swap the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter, pepper, mustard, cider, vinegar, milk):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, pepper, mustard, cider, vinegar, milk. 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

Spinach SoupSpinach Soup50 recipesCream of SpinachCream of Spinach29 recipesCreamed Spinach SoupCreamed Spinach Soup19 recipesHam in CiderHam in Cider10 recipes