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Salad

Spinach Salad

A salad of cooked spinach served with lettuce, mayonnaise, lemon, eggs, and optional pickled beets or Spanish red peppers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Spinach Salad

Why it works: Spinach and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 427 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Spinach Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Wash the spinach thoroughly and cook in a small amount of water until tender.

  2. Drain well, chop finely, and season with melted butter, salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

  3. Mold the spinach in small cups and let cool.

Serve

  1. Turn out the spinach onto lettuce leaves and garnish with slices of lemon and hard boiled eggs.

  2. Dress with mayonnaise and add pickled beets or Spanish red peppers if desired.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together427 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach
Forms the main body of the dish, and cooking it until tender softens its texture for molding.
Melted butter
Adds fat and richness, coating the spinach for a smoother mouthfeel.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and creaminess to the dressing, moistening the molded spinach.
Hard boiled eggs
Add protein-rich body and a mild, creamy contrast to the spinach.

The step that matters

Drain the spinach well before chopping and molding. Excess water left in cooked spinach dilutes the seasoning and keeps the molded shape from holding together, so it should be squeezed or drained thoroughly first.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Lettucethe original

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