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Spinach a LA Parisienne

A sautéed spinach dish flavored with butter, sugar, nutmeg, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 a LA Parisienne

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Remove the leaves from the stalks of the spinach.

  2. Boil the spinach in water with a little salt for twenty minutes.

  3. Drain the spinach thoroughly and dry it.

Finish and season

  1. Chop the spinach finely and return it to the heat.

  2. Add butter, sugar, nutmeg, pepper, and salt, and stir for two minutes.

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach leaves
Forms the bulk of the dish and carries the buttery, seasoned flavour.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the chopped spinach a smooth, glossy texture.
Sugar
Adds a touch of sweetness that softens the spinach's natural bitterness.

The step that matters

Drain and dry the spinach thoroughly. Excess water dilutes the butter and seasoning and makes the spinach watery. Removing it before chopping and reheating keeps the texture thick and the flavour concentrated.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits about as well
  3. Parsnipfits about as well
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, nutmeg, pepper. 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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