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Spinach Ragout

Spinach ragout is a creamy spinach dish cooked with butter and gravy soup, seasoned with salt and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 Ragout

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Pick and clean the spinach, then place it in plenty of boiling water.

  2. Add a small handful of coarse sea salt and cook until the spinach separates easily.

  3. Strain the spinach and place it in fresh water for 10 minutes, then strain again.

  4. Chop the spinach and place it in a stewpan with the butter, stirring continuously.

Finish and serve

  1. Once the butter is absorbed, add enough well-seasoned gravy soup to achieve a cream-like consistency.

  2. Stir in a pinch of grated nutmeg and serve.

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

Spinach
Forms the bulk of the dish and is softened by blanching so it can be chopped and blended.
Fresh butter
Enriches the spinach with fat and carries flavour as it is stirred in with the chopped leaves.
Well-seasoned gravy soup
Supplies liquid and savoury seasoning, turning the spinach into a creamy, spoonable ragout.

The step that matters

Stirring the spinach in the butter. Stirring continuously over heat keeps the chopped spinach from scorching and lets the butter coat the leaves evenly before liquid is added.

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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