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Spinach - Custard, or Cheese

A baked spinach custard made with butter, bread crumbs, cream, eggs, and served with sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Spinach - Custard, or Cheese

Oven, in the book's wordsA slack oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. In a pan, melt butter and add chopped spinach.

  2. Stir in bread crumbs and moisten with cream until consistent.

  3. Boil for a few minutes, stirring constantly, then season and let cool slightly.

Make the custard

  1. Incorporate whole eggs and egg yolks into the mixture.

Bake and serve

  1. Butter a timbale mold and fill it with the spinach mixture.

  2. Poach in a bain-marie for 45 minutes.

  3. Turn out onto a dish and mask with sauce.

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

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

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

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

  3. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the mixture into a firm, sliceable custard as they cook.
Bread crumbs
Absorb cream and give the mixture body and structure.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, keeping the custard tender.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor to the spinach and carries its aroma.
Spinach
Provides the main vegetable flavor and green color.

The step that matters

Poach in a bain-marie for 45 minutes. Gentle, indirect heat lets the egg proteins set smoothly. Too much heat would curdle the custard into a grainy, rubbery texture with holes.

Swap the spinach

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, bread, cream, egg, sauce. 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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