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Spinach

A sautéed spinach dish flavored with butter, pepper, salt, and garnished with fried bread croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,400 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Spinach

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Wash the spinach thoroughly and remove the coarse stalks.

  2. Place the spinach in a rinsed pan with the water that clings to the leaves.

Cook and strain

  1. Cover the pan and cook until tender, stirring frequently.

  2. Drain the spinach in a sieve and rub it through to remove any lumps.

Season and serve

  1. In a pan, combine the spinach with a small pat of butter, and add pinches of pepper and salt. Heat thoroughly and pile neatly on a hot vegetable dish.

  2. Garnish with tiny croutons of fried bread.

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 + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

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

  3. Spinach + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh spinach
Forms the main body of the dish and cooks down to a tender purée.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the spinach a smooth, silky mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Rubbing the spinach through a sieve. Spinach cooked whole stays fibrous and lumpy. Pressing it through a sieve breaks the leaf structure into a smooth, even purée, so lumps do not spoil the texture.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, bread. 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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