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Another Common English Receipt for Spinach

A simple cooked spinach dish seasoned with coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and bread work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Another Common English Receipt for Spinach

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the spinach leaves from the stalks, checking for and removing any weeds.

  2. Wash the spinach thoroughly to remove all grit.

Cook

  1. Place the spinach in a large saucepan with the water that clings to it.

  2. Add the salt and press the spinach down with a wooden spoon, stirring often for about 15 minutes until tender.

  3. Drain excess moisture and chop the spinach on a hot plate.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately, optionally with fried bread snippets.

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 + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh spinach leaves
Forms the main body of the dish, collapsing into a soft, tender mass as it cooks.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the spinach and helps draw out moisture as the leaves cook down.

The step that matters

Drain excess moisture. Spinach holds a lot of water, and leftover liquid thins the texture and dilutes flavor. Draining well before chopping keeps the dish from becoming soupy.

“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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