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Spinach, Piemontaise

A sautéed spinach dish flavored with anchovy paste, garlic, butter, and light Espagnole sauce, served 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 garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,435 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Spinach, Piemontaise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

Make the spinach

  1. Melt a piece of butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add finely chopped garlic to the melted butter.

  3. Stir in three handfuls of the chopped spinach and one tablespoon of anchovy paste.

  4. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  5. Add two tablespoons of light Espagnole sauce.

Serve

  1. Before serving, garnish with poached eggs or small pieces of 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 + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Anchovy + saucetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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 and carries the flavour and texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and carries the garlic and anchovy flavour through the pan.
Anchovy paste
Adds a deep savoury, salty note that rounds out the spinach.
Light espagnole sauce
Adds body and savoury depth, thickening the spinach and binding it together.
Eggs
Served as a garnish, adding richness from the yolk when broken into the spinach.

Swap the garlic

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (spinach, butter, anchovy, pepper, sauce, egg, bread):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, butter, anchovy, pepper, sauce, egg, bread. 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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