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Dessert

A Tansy

A custard made with eggs, cream, spinach juice, tansy juice, and flavored with white wine and nutmeg.

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

Make the custard

  1. Beat the eggs, yolks and whites separately.

  2. Add cream, spinach juice, tansy juice, Naples biscuit, sugar, white wine, and nutmeg.

  3. Heat the mixture in a saucepan just to thicken.

Bake

  1. Pour into a dish lined with pastry and bake until set.

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
Coagulate when heated, giving the custard its set structure.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, producing a softer, smoother texture.
Naples biscuit
Absorbs liquid and gives the custard body and a tender crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the savoury spinach and tansy flavours.

The step that matters

Heat the mixture just to thicken. Egg proteins set as they warm, so heating gently and stopping once thickened keeps the custard smooth. Overheating causes the eggs to curdle and turn grainy.

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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