Name: Cooked Spinach or Yellow Dock or Mustard Greens or Dandelion Leaves
Ingredients: cooked spinach; yellow dock; mustard greens; dandelion leaves; rye bread; wheat bread; butter; eggs; bacon

Why it works: Dock and dandelion share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cooked Spinach or Yellow Dock or Mustard Greens or Dandelion Leaves

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the spinach, yellow dock, mustard greens, or dandelion leaves until tender.
Serve with rye or wheat bread and butter.
Add eggs or bacon if desired.

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.

Dock + dandeliontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together25 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Spinach + dandeliontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together16 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Rye + wheattop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together404 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Mustard + dandeliontop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together30 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Spinach + mustardtop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together503 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked spinach: Forms the main body of the dish and provides the leafy green base.
Butter: Adds fat and richness to the bread served alongside the greens.
Eggs: Add richness and body when included as an optional addition.
Bacon: Adds savory fat and flavor when included as an optional addition.

Swap the dock

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (spinach, mustard, dandelion, rye, bread, wheat, butter):

Capersfits better
Tarragonfits better
Garlicfits better
Dockthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, mustard, dandelion, rye, bread, wheat, butter. 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.