Name: Baked Mashed Potatoes with Spinach, Frankfurt Style
Ingredients: Potatoes; cooked spinach, finely chopped; coarse sea salt; black pepper; nutmeg; butter; fresh bread crumbs

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 ↓

Baked Mashed Potatoes with Spinach, Frankfurt Style

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the potatoes as described in the previous recipe.
Add a quarter of the quantity of potatoes in finely chopped cooked spinach.
Season with coarse sea salt, black pepper, and nutmeg.
Mix well and transfer to a buttered baking dish.
Sprinkle fresh bread crumbs and a piece of butter on top.
Bake in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C) until heated through.

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.

Spinach + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together603 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Potato + spinachtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together646 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Spinach + peppertop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,400 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

Swap the potato

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

Shallotfits better
Chivefits about as well
Leekfits about as well
Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, pepper, nutmeg, butter, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.