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Spinach with Cream

A creamy spinach dish made with butter, flour, cream, and spices, served hot with fried bread garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 with Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Boil the spinach until tender.

  2. Chop the spinach finely.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour, salt, nutmeg, and sugar, stirring until combined.

  3. Pour in the cream.

  4. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  5. Add the chopped spinach.

  6. Heat through.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

  2. Garnish with pieces of fried bread.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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 the creamed spinach its green color and vegetable body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor and giving the sauce a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the butter and cream into a smooth sauce that clings to the spinach.
Cream
Provides the liquid base of the sauce and adds richness and a silky texture.
Sugar
Adds a small amount of sweetness that balances the bitterness of the spinach.

The step that matters

Bring the mixture to a boil. Flour must be heated long enough in the butter and cream to swell and thicken the sauce. Boiling also helps it reach a smooth, cohesive texture before the spinach is added, so the sauce does not stay thin or grainy.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Spinachthe original

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