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Another Common English Receipt for Spinach

A boiled spinach dish seasoned with coarse sea salt, served with fried bread slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Another Common English Receipt for Spinach

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove spinach leaves from stalks, wash thoroughly to remove grit or weeds.

  2. Place spinach in a large saucepan with the water that clings to it.

  3. Add 1 teaspoon coarse sea salt and press spinach down with a wooden spoon.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook about 15 minutes, stirring often, until spinach is tender.

  2. Drain excess moisture, chop spinach, serve immediately.

  3. Serve with fried slices of bread 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.

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 + 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
Forms the main body of the dish and cooks down to a tender, soft texture.

The step that matters

Cook about 15 minutes, stirring often, until spinach is tender. Spinach is mostly water, so it releases moisture as it heats. Stirring often keeps the leaves cooking evenly and helps the moisture evaporate, so the dish does not turn watery or unevenly cooked.

“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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