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Spinach a LA Francaise

A creamy spinach dish flavored with butter, cream, sugar, salt, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 603 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Spinach a LA Francaise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Boil spinach, then drain.

  2. Chop spinach finely and place in saucepan with butter.

  3. Stir over gentle heat until butter has evaporated.

Season and finish

  1. Add salt, sugar, nutmeg, and simmer for about 5 minutes.

  2. Pour in cream carefully to avoid curdling.

  3. Serve hot, garnished with toasted bread or puff pastry leaves.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Cream + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 carries its green, earthy flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour as it coats the chopped spinach.
Cream
Adds moisture and a smooth, silky texture to the finished spinach.
Powdered sugar
Adds a small amount of sweetness that balances the spinach's bitterness.

The step that matters

Pour in cream carefully to avoid curdling.. Cream can separate or curdle when it meets a hot, salty mixture and is heated too fast. Adding it gently over low heat keeps the emulsion smooth and the texture silky.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, cream, sugar, nutmeg. 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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