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Spinach Stewed Witil Cream

A stew of fresh spinach cooked with butter, spices, and heavy cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 Stewed Witil Cream

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Wash the spinach thoroughly in several changes of water and remove any decayed leaves.

  2. Boil the spinach in a large pot of salted water for 15 minutes.

  3. Chop the cooked spinach finely.

  4. Beat the chopped spinach well with a spoon, ensuring all fibers are removed.

Make the creamed spinach

  1. In a stewing pan, combine the chopped spinach with butter, pepper, salt, nutmeg, and sugar.

  2. Stir the mixture as it cooks, gradually adding cream until it reaches the desired thickness.

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  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 it its green color and earthy flavor.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor and giving a smooth mouthfeel.
Heavy cream
Adds moisture and richness, thickening the mixture as it reduces during cooking.
Sugar
Adds a touch of sweetness that balances the bitterness of the spinach.

The step that matters

Beating the chopped spinach to remove fibers. Spinach fibers left in the purée give a stringy, coarse texture, so the spinach should be beaten smooth before the cream is added.

Swap the spinach

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

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

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