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Spinach Fritters

A fried patty made from cooked spinach, butter, milk, eggs, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Spinach Fritters

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Pass the cooked spinach through a sieve into an earthenware cooking vessel.

Make the mixture

  1. Add butter, salt, spices, sugar, and lemon zest; mix thoroughly over gentle heat.

  2. Stir in the milk and cook until the mixture thickens.

  3. Add the beaten eggs and mix well.

Fry

  1. Form the mixture into fritters and fry until golden brown.

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

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

  3. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 fritters and supplies the earthy, green flavour.
Eggs
Set when heated, binding the mixture together and giving the fritters structure.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness, and thickens with heat to form a creamy base.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and helping the fritters brown.

The step that matters

Thickening the mixture before adding the eggs. Cooking the milk mixture until it thickens lets it hold together. If it is still thin when the eggs go in, the fritters may be loose and difficult to shape and fry.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Spinachthe original

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