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Spinach, American Style

A sautéed spinach dish flavored with butter, salt, pepper, nutmeg, veal gravy, and garnished with hard‑boiled eggs or buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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, American Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare and cook the spinach as directed in recipe No. 1452.

  2. Chop the cooked spinach finely.

Make the spinach

  1. In a saucepan, combine the chopped spinach with a piece of butter.

  2. Season with coarse sea salt, black pepper, and a pinch of nutmeg.

  3. Stir well with a wooden spoon until thoroughly warmed.

  4. Add a few spoonfuls of veal gravy and mix well.

Serve

  1. Serve garnished with hard-boiled eggs cut into quarters or small pieces of buttered toast cut into fancy shapes.

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 + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach
Forms the main body of the dish, giving it its bulk and earthy green flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and smooth texture, carrying flavour through the warm spinach.
Veal gravy
Adds savoury depth and moisture, loosening the chopped spinach into a spoonable mixture.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Spinachthe original
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Shallotfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, nutmeg, veal, 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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