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Stewed Spinach

A cooked spinach dish simmered with butter, flour, spices, and cream, served with toasted bread dipped in melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Stewed Spinach

Ingredients

Directions

Blanch the spinach

  1. Boil water and add coarse sea salt.

  2. Add young spinach and boil for a few minutes.

  3. Remove spinach, drain, and place in cold water for 15 minutes.

  4. Drain again and squeeze out excess water.

Stew

  1. Chop spinach and place in a stew pan with a large piece of butter.

  2. Stew slowly for 15 minutes.

  3. Add flour, salt, sugar, and nutmeg.

  4. Moisten with cream or milk and simmer for another 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve topped with slices of toasted bread dipped in melted butter.

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

Young spinach
Forms the main body of the dish, wilting down into a soft, tender mass when stewed.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and giving the stewed spinach a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid, helping the cream or milk turn into a smooth, coating sauce.
Cream or milk
Moistens the spinach and, as it simmers, forms a creamy sauce that binds the greens.

The step that matters

Squeezing out the excess water after blanching. Spinach holds a lot of water. If it is not squeezed dry before stewing, the extra liquid dilutes the sauce and keeps the flour from thickening it properly.

Swap the spinach

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