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To Dress Spinach

A sautéed spinach dish cooked with butter, broth, nutmeg, and served with fried bread toasts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Carefully pick the spinach leaves from the stalks and wash them in several waters until clean.

  2. Boil the spinach in salted water, then drain it well.

  3. Pound the spinach in a mortar and transfer it to a saucepan with 2 tablespoons of butter and broth.

Cook and finish

  1. Stew over low heat for 45 minutes until very dry.

  2. Add ¼ pound of fresh butter, salt, and grated nutmeg, and mix until thick without letting the butter turn to oil.

  3. Garnish with fried bread toasts cut into desired shapes.

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. Spinach + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together603 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Spinach + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach
Forms the bulk of the dish and, once stewed dry, becomes a thick, spoonable base.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy texture when worked into the dried spinach.
Broth
Provides moisture and savory flavor while the spinach cooks down.
Nutmeg
Adds a warm, aromatic note that complements the spinach and butter.

The step that matters

Adding the butter without letting it separate. Once the spinach is dry, adding butter over heat can cause the fat to separate and turn oily. Mixing steadily off a strong heat helps the butter emulsify into a thick, smooth texture.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, nutmeg, bread. 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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