Name: Anotheb Common English Receipt for Spinach
Ingredients: Fresh spinach leaves; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; Fried bread sippets (for serving)

Why it works: Spinach and bread work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Anotheb Common English Receipt for Spinach

Ingredients

Fresh spinach leaves
¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt
Fried bread sippets (for serving)

Directions

Prepare the spinach

Remove the spinach leaves from the stalks, checking for and discarding any weeds.
Wash the spinach thoroughly to remove all grit.

Cook

Place the spinach in a large saucepan with the water that clings to the leaves.
Add the salt and press the spinach down with a wooden spoon, stirring often for about 15 minutes until tender.

Finish and serve

Drain excess moisture and chop the spinach on a hot plate.
Serve immediately with fried bread slices on the side.

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.

Spinach + breadtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together466 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh spinach leaves: Forms the main body of the dish and collapses into a soft, tender mass when cooked.
Fried bread sippets: Adds crisp contrast to the soft, tender spinach.

“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.