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Spinach Dressed with Cream

A spinach dish dressed with butter, cream, sugar, nutmeg, served warm with croutons or hard-boiled egg slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 Dressed with Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Boil the spinach until tender.

  2. Press out the water and chop the spinach finely.

Make the creamed spinach

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

  2. Add the chopped spinach and stir until well mixed with the butter.

  3. Heat the cream separately and add it to the spinach mixture to prevent curdling.

  4. Stir in the sugar and nutmeg.

Serve

  1. Serve warm, garnished with croutons or slices of hard-boiled egg.

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

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

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Cream + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 green colour and earthy flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel as it coats the chopped spinach.
Cream
Adds moisture and smoothness, turning the spinach into a creamy sauce.
Sugar
Adds a little sweetness that balances the bitterness of the spinach.

The step that matters

Heating the cream separately before adding it. Adding cold cream to the hot spinach and butter can make the dairy separate or curdle. Warming the cream first helps it blend smoothly into the spinach.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Leekfits about as well
  2. Sweet potatofits about as well
  3. Spinachthe original
  4. Chivefits about as well

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