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Greens, Spinach, Etc

A sautéed spinach dish seasoned with butter, salt, pepper, and optional cream, lemon, or vinegar, garnished with hard‑boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Greens, Spinach, Etc

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Pick over and trim the spinach, then wash it in five waters and drain.

  2. Place the spinach in a kettle with the water that drips from it.

Cook and season

  1. Cook slowly at first until the juice is drawn out, then cook quickly until tender.

  2. Drain and rinse if you dislike the strong flavor, then chop the spinach.

  3. Reheat the chopped spinach, season with butter, coarse sea salt, and pepper.

  4. Add cream if desired, or serve with lemon or vinegar.

  5. If serving as a course, garnish with hard boiled eggs or serve cold as a salad.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

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

  5. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach
Forms the body of the dish and gives it its main flavor and texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor across the cooked leaves.

The step that matters

Cook slowly at first until the juice is drawn out. Starting low and slow lets the spinach release its own water gently, so it wilts evenly. Cooking hard from the start can scorch the leaves before the juices come out, leaving the spinach unevenly cooked and tough.

“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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