Name: American Spinach
Ingredients: 3 pounds spinach; 2 tablespoons butter; ¼ teaspoon pepper; 1 teaspoon sugar; 4 hard-boiled egg yolks; 1 ounce butter, dissolved; 2 teaspoons cream; 1 lemon, juiced

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 ↓

American Spinach

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

Boil spinach and pass through a sieve.
Mix in butter, pepper, and sugar while hot.
Transfer to a dish.

Dress and finish

Prepare egg dressing by mixing yolks, dissolved butter, cream, and lemon juice.
Cover spinach with egg dressing.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Spinach + lemontop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,109 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Spinach + peppertop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,400 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,516 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach: Forms the main body of the dish once boiled and sieved into a smooth purée.
Egg yolks: Add richness and body to the dressing, helping it coat the spinach smoothly.
Butter: Adds fat and a silky, rich mouthfeel to the spinach and the dressing.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness of the butter and yolks.

Swap the spinach

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

Asparagusfits about as well
Capsicumfits about as well
Spinachthe original
Leekfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, sugar, egg, cream, lemon. 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.