Skip to main content
Salad

Spinach Salad

Spinach salad with onions, mint, and dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Spinach Salad

Why it works: Spinach and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,336 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Spinach Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the spinach leaves thoroughly and remove any tough stems.

  2. Finely chop the spinach, young onions, and mint.

Combine and serve

  1. Combine the chopped ingredients in a bowl.

  2. Serve with your choice of salad dressing.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,336 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Spinach + minttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together290 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Onion + minttop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,389 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Young spinach leaves
Provides the main bulk and leafy texture of the salad.
Young onions
Adds sharp, aromatic flavour to the leaves.
Mint
Adds a fresh, aromatic herbal note.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (spinach, onion):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, onion. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes