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Broiled Chops with Spinach

A dish of lamb chops broiled and served with sautéed spinach mixed with butter, salt, pepper, and grated horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and horseradish share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 39 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Broiled Chops with Spinach

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Cook the spinach leaves in boiling salted water until tender.

  2. Press out the water from the spinach and chop it finely.

  3. Mix the chopped spinach with 2 tablespoons of butter, salt, and pepper.

Cook and serve

  1. Broil the lamb chops until cooked to your liking.

  2. Serve the spinach as a mound on a serving dish and arrange the broiled lamb chops against it.

  3. Garnish with grated horseradish.

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 + horseradishtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together39 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Spinach + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Lamb + spinachtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together300 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Pepper + horseradishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Lamb + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb chops
Provide the main protein, which browns under the broiler while staying tender inside.
Spinach leaves
Form a soft, moist bed that holds the chops and adds a mild, earthy flavour.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the chopped spinach a smooth, silky texture.
Horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat that cuts through the richness of the lamb and butter.

The step that matters

Pressing out the spinach water. Spinach holds a lot of water, and if it is not squeezed out well, the mixture turns watery and dilutes the butter, leaving the mound loose and soggy on the plate.

Swap the horseradish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, spinach, butter, pepper, vinegar):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, spinach, butter, pepper, vinegar. 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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