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Salad

Spinach Salad

A salad of cooked spinach, hard‑boiled eggs, and French dressing, garnished with lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Spinach Salad

Why it works: Spinach and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 427 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Spinach Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Wash and pick over the spinach.

  2. Cook the spinach with ½ cup water until tender.

  3. Drain and chop the spinach very fine.

Dress and serve

  1. Add the chopped whites of the hard-boiled eggs and sufficient French dressing to taste.

  2. Transfer to a large platter and garnish with crisped leaves of lettuce and slices of the remaining hard-boiled egg.

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.

  1. Spinach + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together427 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Spinach + eggtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,323 recipes

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

  3. Egg + lettucetop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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 salad; cooking softens it and chopping gives a fine, uniform texture.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and a mild, creamy body from the cooked whites and yolks.
French dressing
Adds acidity and sweetness and moistens the chopped greens.

The step that matters

Chopping the spinach very fine after draining. Spinach holds a lot of water after cooking; if it is not well drained, the salad turns watery and the dressing thins out. Chopping it finely gives an even, tender texture that holds the dressing.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Lettucethe original
  4. Welsh onionfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, 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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