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Spinach Au Beurre

Spinach sautéed in butter and served with fried bread or toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Spinach Au Beurre

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Wash the spinach thoroughly.

  2. Cover the spinach with boiling water mixed with salt and boil until tender.

  3. Drain through a colander and chop finely.

Cook and serve

  1. In a saucepan, lightly brown the butter.

  2. Add the chopped spinach to the butter and steam the spinach well in the butter.

  3. Serve in a vegetable dish, garnished with triangular pieces of fried bread or toast.

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

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

  2. Spinach + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Spinach + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,583 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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 provides its tender, leafy texture once cooked.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavor as the spinach steams in it.

The step that matters

Drain and chop the spinach thoroughly. Excess water left in cooked spinach dilutes the butter and makes the dish watery. Draining well lets the spinach steam in butter rather than boil in its liquid.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, 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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