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Spinach Padding

A custard made from spinach, eggs, cream, bread, butter, nutmeg, and orange juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 603 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Spinach Padding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Pick and wash the spinach.

  2. Put spinach in a saucepan with salt, cover, and boil until tender.

  3. Drain spinach in a sieve and chop it.

Make the pudding

  1. Beat the eggs and mix with cream, grated roll, nutmeg, and melted butter.

  2. Stir the mixture into the saucepan with the spinach until thickened.

  3. Wet and flour a cloth, tie it up, and boil for 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Turn onto a dish, pour melted butter and juice of a Seville orange over it, sprinkle with grated sugar, and serve hot.

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 + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together603 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Cream + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  4. Nutmeg + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Spinach + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach
Forms the bulk of the pudding and gives it a green, earthy flavour and body.
Eggs
Set when heated, binding the spinach and cream into a firm, sliceable pudding.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, giving the custard-like mixture a softer, smoother texture.
Stale roll
Absorbs liquid and thickens the mixture, giving it body and structure.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel, and is poured over at the end.

The step that matters

Stir the mixture into the spinach until thickened. Egg proteins set when heated, so the mixture must be cooked gently until thickened. Overheating can curdle the eggs and make the texture grainy rather than smooth.

Swap the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, cream, nutmeg, butter):

  1. Leekfits about as well
  2. Spinachthe original
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Chivefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cream, nutmeg, butter. 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.

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