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Spinach Dressed with Egg

A spinach dish dressed with a smooth egg yolk mixture, seasoned with butter, sugar, nutmeg, and lemon.

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

Spinach Dressed with Egg

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Boil the spinach in plenty of salted hot water for 20 minutes.

  2. Drain and press out the water, then chop finely.

Cook the spinach

  1. Return the spinach to the heat with butter, sugar, salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

  2. Cook until hot and smooth, then transfer to a deep dish.

Make the egg topping and serve

  1. In a mortar, pound the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs until smooth.

  2. Mix in melted butter, cream, and lemon juice to form a paste.

  3. Spread the egg mixture over the spinach and garnish with sliced egg whites.

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 bulk of the dish and, once cooked and chopped, gives it a soft, smooth texture.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the cooked spinach.
Hard-boiled eggs
Yolks are mashed into a paste that forms the creamy topping over the spinach.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and egg flavours.
Sugar
Adds a small amount of sweetness that balances the bitterness of the spinach.

The step that matters

Cook until hot and smooth. Spinach that is not drained and pressed well will stay watery and dilute the butter, so the dish turns loose instead of creamy. Pressing out the water before chopping and reheating keeps the texture smooth and concentrated.

Swap the spinach

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

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

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