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Dessert

A Tansey

A custard made with eggs, cream, spinach juice, tangy juice, Naples biscuit, sugar, white wine, and nutmeg, baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and nutmeg work together. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and 603 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

The recipe

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Contains: egg, milk, wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat the egg yolks and whites separately.

  2. Combine the cream, spinach juice, tangy juice, Naples biscuit, sugar, white wine, and nutmeg.

Make the custard

  1. Heat the mixture in a saucepan just until it thickens.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a dish lined with pastry.

  2. Bake until set and lightly browned.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Spinach + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together603 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cream + sugartop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together43,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Cream + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together7,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  4. Spinach + biscuittop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together58 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Biscuit + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together368 recipes

    Shared aroma: maltol (caramel, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard into a firm, sliceable texture as they cook and coagulate.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, tender texture to the custard.
Spinach juice
Provides the green color and the spinach flavor of the custard.
Naples biscuit
Soaks up liquid and gives the custard body and a light, cake-like crumb.
White wine
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Heat the mixture just until it thickens. Egg proteins set at moderate heat and can curdle or turn grainy if overheated, so the mixture should be heated gently and removed as soon as it thickens.

Flavor stand-ins for the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, cream, biscuit, sugar, white wine, nutmeg):

  1. Sweet potatoabout as good a flavor fit
  2. Potatoabout as good a flavor fit
  3. Asparagusabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cream, biscuit, sugar, white wine, nutmeg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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