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French Spinach

A spinach dish cooked with roux, white stock, spices, and lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

French Spinach

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Boil the spinach as directed in previous recipes.

  2. Chop the boiled spinach.

Make the spinach

  1. Heat the chopped spinach with the roux.

  2. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Add the white stock, nutmeg or mace, sugar, and grated lemon peel.

  4. Stir well to combine and enhance the flavor.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Spinach + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together603 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach
Forms the body of the dish and supplies its green color and earthy flavor.
Roux
Thickens the spinach into a creamy, cohesive texture as it heats.
White stock (chicken or veal)
Adds liquid and savory depth, loosening the roux-thickened spinach.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, pepper, chicken, sugar, lemon. 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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