Skip to main content
Main

Spinach, German Style

A sautéed spinach dish flavored with butter, onion, paprika, nutmeg, flour, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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, German Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Wash the spinach, then cook, drain, chill, and chop it finely.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, cook the butter and onion together for five minutes.

  2. Add the salt, paprika, nutmeg, and flour, cooking slowly until the flour is pale brown.

  3. Gradually stir in the stock until smoothly thickened.

Combine and simmer

  1. Add the spinach, cover, and simmer for twenty minutes.

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. Spinach + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,336 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + chickentop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 body and green color.
Butter
Carries the onion's flavor and enriches the sauce with fat.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce and gives it body.
Chicken or veal stock
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into the sauce.
Onion
Adds savory, aromatic flavor to the butter base.

The step that matters

Gradually stir in the stock until smoothly thickened. Adding liquid all at once to flour can form lumps, because flour granules clump before their starch can hydrate evenly. Adding stock slowly while stirring disperses the flour so the sauce thickens smooth.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

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

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipesChicken PanadaChicken Panada75 recipes