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To Stew Spinach

A sautéed spinach dish cooked with butter, flour, cream or egg, and seasoned with salt, sugar, and optional lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,109 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

To Stew Spinach

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Wash the spinach in several waters and pick it well.

  2. Boil the spinach for a few minutes, then drain and squeeze out the water using a cloth or colander.

  3. Chop the spinach finely and place it in a saucepan over moderate heat.

Stew

  1. Stir the spinach until it is dry, about 10 minutes.

  2. Dredge in the flour while stirring.

  3. Add cream or the egg mixture.

  4. Season with salt and sugar.

  5. Stir until the moisture evaporates.

Serve

  1. Add lemon juice after removing from heat.

  2. Serve hot with sippets or press into a hot mold.

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 + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 dish; cooking and drying it concentrates its flavour and gives the stew its body.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the stewed greens.
Flour
Thickens the moisture released by the spinach so the stew holds together rather than running.
Cream or beaten egg with milk
Enriches the stew and, when heated, the egg helps it set and thicken slightly.

The step that matters

Stir until the moisture evaporates. Spinach releases a lot of water as it cooks. If the stew is not dried down before serving, the flour cannot thicken it properly and it stays watery.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (spinach, butter, flour, cream, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, butter, flour, cream, sugar. 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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