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Drink

Spinach Juice

A chilled or poached spinach juice, optionally sweetened with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,033 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Spinach Juice

Ingredients

Directions

Extract the juice

  1. Pound the spinach in a mortar until it becomes a pulp.

  2. Press the pulp through a fine sieve to extract the juice.

  3. Pour the juice into a clean jar.

Set the juice

  1. Place the jar in a pan of simmering water.

  2. Allow the juice to poach for 3-4 minutes until set.

  3. Gently remove the set juice with a spoon.

  4. Drain the juice on a fine sieve.

Finish and store

  1. For immediate use, mix the juice with finely powdered sugar.

  2. Pound the juice with enough sugar to make it dry.

  3. Boil to candy height.

  4. Pour into cakes.

  5. Store in a tin box.

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 + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach
Provides the green colour and the juice that the whole preparation is built on.
Finely powdered sugar
Sweetens the juice and, when pounded in, helps dry it out into a solid mass.

The step that matters

Allow the juice to poach for 3-4 minutes until set. Heating the juice gently in simmering water lets it thicken and set without boiling, which would make it grainy or cause it to lose colour and texture. Removing it at the right moment keeps it firm but not hard.

“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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