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Green Sauce, for Boiled Chicken

A green sauce made from spinach juice, lemon juice, egg yolks, and sugar, served warm with boiled chicken.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,109 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Green Sauce, for Boiled Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine spinach juice, lemon juice, beaten egg yolks, and sugar in a saucepan.

  2. Heat gently, but do not let it boil.

  3. Serve warm.

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 + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Spinach + eggtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,323 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach juice
Forms the liquid base and gives the sauce its green color and moisture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sugar.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they gently coagulate with heat, giving it body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that rounds out the sharpness of the lemon.

The step that matters

Heat gently, but do not let it boil.. Egg yolks begin to thicken around moderate heat but can curdle or scramble if overheated. Low, gentle heat lets the sauce thicken smoothly without grainy texture.

Swap the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, egg, sugar):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits about as well
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, egg, sugar. 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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