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Spinach with Creah

A sautéed spinach dish finished with butter, cream, and flour, served with fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Spinach with Creah

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Wash the spinach in several waters to remove grit.

  2. Place spinach in a saucepan with a little water and salt; cook until done.

  3. Strain the spinach, chop it finely, and set aside.

Make the creamed spinach

  1. In a skillet, warm the butter, then add the spinach and stir until moisture evaporates.

  2. Add salt, sugar, nutmeg (if desired), flour, and cream; simmer for 15 minutes.

  3. Pass the mixture through a sieve and keep warm.

Serve

  1. Cut the bread into fingers, fry in oil until golden, and arrange on top of the spinach when serving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  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 provides its green color and earthy flavor.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor and giving the spinach a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the cream and moisture from the spinach so the mixture becomes smooth and coats well.
Heavy cream
Adds fat and body, making the spinach silky and rich once simmered.
Bread
Fried until golden, it adds a crisp, contrasting texture on top of the soft spinach.

The step that matters

Stir the spinach until moisture evaporates. Spinach holds a lot of water. If it is not cooked down in the butter before the flour and cream go in, the sauce will be thin and watery and may not thicken properly.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

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