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Spinach Pudding

Spinach pudding is a baked dish made with spinach, butter, eggs, sugar, bread crumbs, and thickened with flour and an extra egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Spinach Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Wash, pick, and finely chop the spinach.

  2. Cream the butter in a bowl.

  3. Mix in the egg yolks, sugar, and salt.

  4. Add the chopped spinach and bread crumbs.

  5. Fold in the egg whites.

Cook

  1. Place the mixture in a buttered cloth sprinkled with bread crumbs.

  2. Boil in water for 1 hour.

Press, shape and serve

  1. Press the mixture through a sieve.

  2. Shape the pressed mixture and place it on a dish.

  3. Serve with melted butter thickened with flour and an additional egg yolk.

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

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

  2. Spinach + flourtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 pudding and supplies its green color and earthy flavor.
Egg yolks
Enrich the mixture and help it set into a firm, custard-like texture when cooked.
Egg whites
Folded in to add air and lightness, then set with heat to give structure.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and carries a silky mouthfeel through the pudding.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture from the spinach and eggs, giving the pudding body and holding its shape.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter sauce served alongside the pudding.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Gentle folding keeps the air bubbles trapped in the whites. Those bubbles give the cooked pudding its lightness, and overmixing deflates them, leaving it dense.

Swap the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, egg, sugar, bread, flour):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, sugar, bread, flour. 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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