Name: Spinach
Ingredients: 2 buckets of water; spinach; salt; butter

Why it works: Spinach and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,583 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Spinach

Ingredients

2 buckets of water
spinach
salt
butter

Directions

Prepare

Wash the spinach thoroughly in two buckets of water.
Bring a pot of salted water to a boil.

Cook and finish

Add the spinach and cook until tender, about 15 minutes.
Drain the spinach and chop it finely with a knife and fork.
Mix in butter until well combined.
Serve in a vegetable dish.

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.

Spinach + buttertop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,583 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach: Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender when boiled.
Butter: Adds richness and moisture, coating the cooked spinach as it is mixed in.

“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.