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To Dress Spinach and Eggs

A dish of boiled spinach dressed with butter, pepper, nutmeg, and poached eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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To Dress Spinach and Eggs

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 ↓

To Dress Spinach and Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Pick and wash the spinach in several waters.

  2. In a saucepan, bring water and salt to a boil. Add the spinach and boil for 5 to 6 minutes until tender.

  3. Drain the spinach in a sieve and squeeze out all the water.

  4. Chop the spinach finely on a board.

Cook the eggs and assemble

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter with pepper and nutmeg until hot.

  2. Spread some of the butter mixture on a serving dish.

  3. In another stewpan, bring water to a boil and gently break in the eggs. Boil the eggs for 3 and a half minutes.

  4. Remove the eggs with a slotted spoon and trim off any loose pieces.

  5. Place the eggs on the spinach in the dish and arrange the remaining spinach around the eggs.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach
Forms the green bed that the eggs sit on and carries the buttery flavour.
Eggs
Set in the hot water to form the centrepiece, firm outside and soft inside.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the flavour of pepper and nutmeg across the dish.

The step that matters

Boiling the eggs for 3 and a half minutes. Egg white sets at around 60 to 70 °C and yolk thickens further as it heats, so timing decides whether the yolk stays runny or turns firm. Keep the water at a steady boil and remove the eggs on time, since a few extra seconds noticeably firms the yolk.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Spinachthe original
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Shallotfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, nutmeg, 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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