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A Spring Salad

A chilled spinach salad with eggs, butter, and seasonings served on lettuce.

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 ↓

A Spring Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Pick over, trim, wash, and cook the spinach in a double boiler until tender.

  2. Drain and chop the spinach very fine.

  3. Season the spinach with salt, paprika, nutmeg, lemon juice, and melted butter.

Shape and chill

  1. Butter some cups and line them with the spinach, leaving a small hole in the center.

  2. Fill the hole with chopped, well-seasoned cold boiled eggs and pack the mixture firmly.

  3. Chill the cups on ice until very cold.

Serve

  1. Turn out the cups onto crisp lettuce and serve with salad dressing.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Spinach + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

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

  4. Nutmeg + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach
Forms the main body of the mold and provides the green, slightly earthy base.
Cold boiled eggs
Provide the firm, contrasting center and rich flavor of the salad.
Melted butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the spinach taste smooth and savory.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the spinach and eggs.

The step that matters

Pack the spinach firmly and chill until very cold. Cooked spinach is mostly water, so loose packing lets the mold collapse when turned out. Firm packing and thorough chilling help the mixture set and hold its shape.

Swap the spinach

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against nutmeg, lemon, butter, egg. 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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