Skip to main content
Main

Spinach with Cream

A sautéed spinach dish finished with butter, flour, nutmeg, sugar, and optional salt, served with croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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. Pick and wash the spinach thoroughly, discarding wilted leaves.

  2. Boil the spinach in plenty of salted water until tender, about 25 minutes.

  3. Drain and place the spinach in cold water for a few minutes.

  4. Press out all moisture and place the spinach in a saucepan with butter.

Cook and serve

  1. Stir over medium heat until dry, then sprinkle with flour, nutmeg, sugar, and salt if desired.

  2. Transfer to a serving dish, garnish with croutons, and serve.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Spinach + flourtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 the creamy sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping coat the spinach with flavour.
Flour
Dries into the butter and thickens the spinach into a creamy coating.

The step that matters

Press out all moisture. Excess water left in the spinach dilutes the sauce and keeps it from thickening. Pressing it dry lets the butter and flour cling to the leaves and form a creamy coating.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Spinachthe original

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

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes