Skip to main content
Main

The Best Way to Cook Spinach

A boiled spinach dish finished with butter, cream, pepper, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

The Best Way to Cook Spinach

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Wash and pick the leaves from the spinach.

  2. In a large kettle, add the spinach and sprinkle with salt.

  3. Pour in boiling water and place the kettle over a brisk fire.

  4. Shake or toss the spinach almost continually for 10 minutes.

  5. Drain and chop the spinach very fine.

Finish and serve

  1. In a saucepan, combine the chopped spinach, butter, cream, pepper, and salt.

  2. Stir constantly until very hot.

  3. Add the lemon juice, transfer to a hot dish, and serve immediately.

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. Pepper + lemontop 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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

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

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; cooking and chopping soften it into a smooth, tender texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the creamed spinach a silky mouthfeel.
Sweet cream
Adds moisture and richness, helping the spinach cling together into a creamy coating.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and cuts the richness of the cream and butter.

The step that matters

Stir constantly until very hot. Cream and butter can separate or scorch if overheated or left unstirred, which would make the sauce grainy or give it a burnt taste. Constant stirring heats the mixture evenly and keeps it smooth.

Swap the spinach

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

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

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

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesSpinach SoupSpinach Soup50 recipesCream of SpinachCream of Spinach29 recipesSpinach and EggsSpinach and Eggs8 recipes