Skip to main content
Bread

Spinach in Croustades

Spinach in Croustades is a dish of spinach baked inside bread crusts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and spinach work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Spinach in Croustades

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the croustades

  1. Cut the crusts off the stale bread and scoop out the center, being careful not to break the bottom.

  2. Brown the bread on all sides over coals or in a 400°F (200°C) oven.

Fill and serve

  1. Mix the chopped spinach with cream or butter and season with coarse sea salt.

  2. Pile the spinach mixture into the croustade.

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. Bread + spinachtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Spinach + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  3. Bread + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,789 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Forms the crisp edible cup that holds the filling; stale bread dries and toasts well.
Spinach
Provides the main filling, cooked-down bulk and a mild, earthy flavor.
Cream or butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the spinach a smooth, moist texture.

The step that matters

Browning the bread shell. The bread must toast until dry and golden on all sides; under-browned shells soften when the moist spinach is added and lose their crispness.

Swap the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, cream):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, cream. 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

CornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesNut BreadNut Bread109 recipesWheat BreadWheat Bread65 recipes