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To Dress Spinach

Spinach sautéed with butter, broth, nutmeg, and salt, then garnished with fried toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

To Dress Spinach

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick the spinach, strip the leaves from the stalks, and wash it in several waters until clean.

  2. Boil the spinach in salted water, then drain it well.

  3. Pound the spinach in a mortar, then transfer it to a saucepan with a little butter and broth.

Cook and finish

  1. Let it stew over low heat for 45 minutes until very dry.

  2. Add ½ cup of fresh butter, salt, and grated nutmeg, and mix well until thick, ensuring the butter does not turn to oil.

  3. Garnish with fried toast cut into desired shapes.

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. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. 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

Fresh spinach
Forms the bulk of the dish and gives its green colour and earthy flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture as it emulsifies into the thickened spinach.
Broth
Adds savoury depth and moisture during the initial stewing.

The step that matters

Stewing until very dry. Spinach holds a lot of water, and excess moisture would thin the butter and stop the mixture thickening. Cooking it long over low heat drives off that water so the butter can be mixed in without separating into oil.

Swap the spinach

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, nutmeg. 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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