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Salad

Spinach and Egg Salad

A chilled spinach and egg salad thickened with gelatin and broth, served on pickled tongue with tartar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 and Egg Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach and gelatin

  1. Press the cooked spinach through a fine sieve.

  2. Soak the gelatin in water until absorbed, then dissolve it in the hot broth.

  3. Add lemon juice, salt, pepper, and spinach to the broth mixture.

Assemble the molds

  1. Slice the hard-boiled eggs and place them in timbale molds with some spinach.

  2. Decorate the sides of the molds with egg slices and fill with spinach mixture.

  3. Use two eggs to decorate four or five molds.

  4. Cut slices from the center for the bottom and crescents from the ends for the sides of the mold.

Unmold and serve

  1. Unmold onto slices of cold pickled tongue.

  2. Serve tartar sauce in a separate dish.

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. Gelatin + saucetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together104 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach
Provides the main flavour and green colour, and its pureed body fills the molds.
Gelatin
Sets the spinach mixture so it holds its shape when unmolded.
Hard-boiled eggs
Give structure and visual decoration to the molds and add richness.
Beef or chicken broth
Carries the gelatin and adds savoury depth to the spinach mixture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the spinach.

The step that matters

Dissolve the gelatin fully before adding the spinach. Gelatin must be soaked until absorbed and fully dissolved in hot liquid; undissolved granules leave gritty spots and uneven setting, so the mold may not hold its shape when unmolded.

Swap the spinach

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against gelatin, beef, lemon, pepper, 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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