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Spinach Pudding

Spinach pudding is a baked dish made with spinach, butter, eggs, sugar, bread crumbs, and served with melted butter thickened with flour and egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Spinach Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pudding

  1. Chop the spinach exceedingly fine.

  2. In a bowl, mix the spinach with the softened butter, egg yolks, sugar, and salt.

  3. Add the bread crumbs and the egg whites to the mixture and combine well.

  4. Place the mixture into a buttered cloth sprinkled with bread crumbs.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil in water for 1 hour.

  2. Press the pudding through a sieve and beat it until smooth.

  3. Transfer to a serving dish and serve with melted butter thickened with flour and an egg yolk.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Spinach + flourtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 its green color and earthy flavor.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, helping the pudding taste soft and smooth.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the pudding as it sets during cooking.
Egg whites
Whisked into the mixture, they add lightness and help the pudding set.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and give the pudding body and structure.

The step that matters

Press the pudding through a sieve and beat it until smooth. Finely chopped spinach still holds fibres that can make the texture stringy or grainy. Pressing and beating breaks these down so the pudding becomes smooth and uniform.

Swap the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, egg, sugar, bread, flour):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, sugar, bread, flour. 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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