Name: Spinach
Ingredients: fresh spinach; coarse sea salt; mayonnaise dressing; hard-boiled eggs

Spinach

A sautéed spinach dish seasoned with coarse sea salt, served with mayonnaise dressing and garnished with sliced hard-boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription

From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients

Why it works: Spinach and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,323 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Spinach

Ingredients

fresh spinach
coarse sea salt
mayonnaise dressing
hard-boiled eggs

Directions

Prepare

Carefully look over the spinach and wash it in two or three waters.
If the stalks are not tender, cut the leaves from the stalk.

Cook

Place the spinach over a slow fire until tender.
Sprinkle the leaves with coarse sea salt.

Serve

Serve with mayonnaise dressing and garnish with hard-boiled eggs cut into slices or rings.

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.

Spinach + eggtop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,323 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh spinach: Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender with gentle heat.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds fat and creaminess that softens the spinach's slightly bitter, earthy flavour.
Hard-boiled eggs: Add soft, rich texture and mild flavour as a garnish.

“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.