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Spinach for Garnishing

A sautéed spinach garnish flavored with butter, flour, stock, and nutmeg, served with beef or veal.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 for Garnishing

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Wash the spinach and cook it in boiling water with salt for 5 minutes.

  2. Transfer the spinach to a bowl of cold water to preserve its color.

  3. Drain the spinach, press out the water, and chop it finely.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt 1 tablespoon of butter and sprinkle in the flour.

  2. Stir the mixture for 5 minutes.

  3. Add ½ teaspoon of salt and ½ pint of stock to the saucepan.

  4. Stir until the mixture boils.

  5. Add a grating of nutmeg to the boiling mixture.

  6. Remove the saucepan from heat.

  7. Stir in 2 tablespoons of extra butter.

Serve

  1. Serve the garnish with spiced beef, beef a la mode, or fricandeau of veal.

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. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Spinach + flourtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 garnish and provides its green color and body.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the stock with butter into a smooth sauce that binds the spinach.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and adds a rich, smooth mouthfeel.
Stock
Forms the liquid of the sauce, which thickens as the flour cooks in the butter.

The step that matters

Transfer the spinach to cold water. Plunging cooked spinach into cold water stops the cooking quickly, which helps it keep a bright green color instead of turning dull.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, nutmeg. 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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