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Spinach Souffle

A light, baked spinach dish folded with egg whites and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Spinach Souffle

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the batter

  1. Chop the cooked spinach very fine.

  2. Add the melted butter, lemon juice, salt, and the yolks of the eggs.

  3. Fold in the beaten egg whites until stiff.

Cook

  1. Turn the mixture into a buttered baking dish or small molds.

  2. Cover and poach in the oven or steam until firm: 30 to 40 minutes for a large mold, 25 to 30 minutes for small molds.

Serve

  1. Serve with hot Boiled Dressing or Drawn Butter Sauce, garnished with hard‑cooked eggs and lemon sections.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Spinach + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  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

Eggs
Whipped whites trap air that lifts the souffle, and the yolks enrich it as it sets.
Spinach
Provides the bulk, body and main flavour of the souffle.
Melted butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, tender texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the mild flavour of the spinach.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. The air trapped in the whites is what raises the souffle as it sets. Folding gently keeps that air in, while overmixing deflates the whites and leaves the set souffle dense. Underfolded whites leave streaks of unmixed egg.

Swap the spinach

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

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

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