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Creamed Spinach

Creamed spinach is a dish of cooked spinach mixed with butter, cream, and egg yolk, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,400 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Creamed Spinach

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Boil spinach in salted water for 20 minutes.

  2. Squeeze out water and chop spinach finely.

Make the creamed spinach

  1. Return spinach to saucepan and add butter, cream, and chopped egg yolk.

  2. Season with salt and pepper.

Serve

  1. Serve garnished with the chopped egg white.

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Spinach + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach
Forms the bulk of the dish and gives it its green color and vegetal flavor.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, giving the spinach a smooth, creamy texture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a rounded, savory flavor.
Hard boiled egg yolk
Its fat and emulsifying lecithin help thicken and enrich the cream sauce.

The step that matters

Squeezing out the water from the spinach. Spinach holds a lot of water after boiling. If it is not squeezed well, the excess liquid dilutes the cream and makes the dish watery and loose.

Swap the spinach

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, cream, egg, pepper. 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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