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Spinach Pudding

A baked pudding made with grated bread, butter, currants, spinach juice, cream, eggs, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and spinach 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 Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix grated bread, butter, currants, sugar, nutmeg, and salt.

  2. Add spinach juice, cream, and eggs; mix well.

Cook

  1. Pour the mixture into a well-buttered basin.

  2. Boil for 1.5 hours.

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. Nutmeg + spinachtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together603 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + creamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set as the pudding cooks.
Grated bread
Provides the body of the pudding, soaking up the liquids to form a soft crumb.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and carries flavour through the pudding.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy bites scattered through the pudding.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture to the batter.

The step that matters

Boil for 1.5 hours. The basin must stay at a steady simmer for the full time so the eggs set through the centre. Too little heat or time leaves the pudding wet and loose in the middle.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, sugar, nutmeg, spinach, cream, egg. 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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