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Spinach with Gravy, French Style

A spinach dish served with a butter‑flour gravy, garnished with poached eggs or toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 with Gravy, French Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare and cook the spinach as in the previous recipe, then chop it finely.

  2. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  3. Add the flour and cook until light brown.

Make the gravy

  1. Stir in the chopped spinach with a wooden spoon.

  2. Add veal broth and season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

  3. Before serving, add a piece of butter and garnish with poached eggs or toasted bread.

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. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + spinachtop 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

Butter
Melted to form the base of the roux and enriches the finished gravy with richness and flavour.
Flour
Cooked in the melted butter to form a roux that thickens the gravy.
Spinach
Chopped finely to form the body and flavour of the gravy.
Veal broth
Liquid that loosens the roux into a savoury gravy.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour until light brown. The flour must be cooked in the butter long enough to lose its raw taste and thicken well, but not so long that it darkens too far and loses thickening power.

Swap the spinach

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

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

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