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Dessert

A Tansy

A custard dessert flavored with tansy juice, spinach juice, and white wine, thickened with eggs and Naples biscuits.

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 eggs, yolks and whites separately.

Make the custard

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

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

Bake and serve

  1. Pour into a dish lined with pastry.

  2. 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
Set the custard as they coagulate on heating, giving it body and structure.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, producing a smooth, tender custard texture.
Naples biscuit
Absorbs liquid and thickens the mixture, giving it body.
Spinach juice
Supplies the green colour and a mild vegetable flavour to the custard.

The step that matters

Heat the mixture just to thicken. Egg proteins set when heated, so overheating in the saucepan can curdle the custard and leave it grainy. Heat gently and stop once 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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