Name: Spinach Salad
Ingredients: cold boiled spinach; butter; pepper; coarse sea salt; lemon juice; mayonnaise; watercress; hard-boiled eggs

Why it works: Spinach and watercress share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 97 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Spinach Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Season cold boiled spinach with butter, pepper, coarse sea salt, and lemon juice.
Press the mixture into shallow cups and refrigerate overnight if possible.
Before serving, hollow out small round places in the center of each salad.
Fill the hollows with mayonnaise.
Garnish individual salad plates with watercress and rings of hard-boiled eggs.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + watercresstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together97 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lemon + watercresstop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together579 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Spinach + lemontop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,109 recipes

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

Swap the spinach

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

Shallotfits about as well
Spinachthe original
Chivefits about as well
Horseradishfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, lemon, watercress, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.