Name: Essence of Spinach
Ingredients: ½ peck fresh spinach; 1 teaspoon fine sugar

Why it works: Spinach and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,033 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Essence of Spinach

Ingredients

½ peck fresh spinach
1 teaspoon fine sugar

Directions

Prepare the spinach

Soak the spinach in water and drain it well.
Pound the spinach thoroughly.
Place the spinach in a coarse cloth and squeeze the juice into a small saucepan.

Make the juice

Heat the juice until it's nearly boiling, then strain it.
Add the sugar and stir until it melts.
Let it cool, then bottle it for later use.

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.

Spinach + sugartop 32% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,033 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach: Provides the green colour and the juice that forms the base of the drink.
Fine sugar: Adds sweetness to balance the grassy flavour of the spinach juice.

“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.