Name: Spinach Home Style
Ingredients: 1 pound fresh spinach; 2 tablespoons butter; coarse sea salt; white pepper

Why it works: Spinach and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,583 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Spinach Home Style

Ingredients

1 pound fresh spinach
2 tablespoons butter
coarse sea salt
white pepper

Directions

Prepare the spinach

Wash the spinach and cook in boiling water for 5 minutes.
Drain and press dry, then chop very fine.

Cook and serve

Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the spinach, and heat thoroughly.
Season with coarse sea salt and white pepper.
Serve in a deep vegetable dish.

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.

Spinach + buttertop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,583 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).
Butter + white peppertop 28% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,814 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Spinach + white peppertop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together56 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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 cooking it softens the leaves for a tender texture.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor and giving the spinach a smooth, glossy coating.