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Spinach Upon Toast

A warm spinach mixture served over buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 Upon Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Wash the spinach well.

  2. Cook the spinach in boiling salted water for 20 minutes.

  3. Drain and chop the spinach very fine.

Make the spinach mixture

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter with the sugar, nutmeg, salt, and pepper.

  2. Stir in the chopped spinach and heat while beating smooth.

  3. At the end, add the cream or milk.

Serve

  1. Pour the spinach mixture over buttered toast slices on a flat dish.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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 dish and gives its green colour and earthy flavour.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and giving the mixture a smooth mouthfeel.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the bitterness of the cooked spinach.
Cream or milk
Adds moisture and creaminess, loosening the mixture and softening its texture.

The step that matters

Beating the spinach smooth while it heats. Chopped spinach can stay stringy or lumpy. Beating it while it warms breaks up the fibres and lets the butter and liquid bind into a uniform purée.

Swap the spinach

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

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

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