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Spinach with Cream Sauce

A spinach dish cooked with butter, cream, and seasonings, served with hard boiled eggs.

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 with Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare and cook the spinach as directed in a previous recipe, then press out all the water and chop it finely.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat until lightly browned.

  2. Add the chopped spinach to the saucepan and stir well with a wooden spoon.

  3. Gradually add the cream while stirring, and season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

Serve

  1. Serve the spinach with hard boiled eggs cut in halves arranged around the dish.

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

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and flavour, and browns lightly to give a nutty note.
Spinach
Forms the body of the dish, with its texture and green colour.
Cream
Turns the spinach into a smooth, rich sauce and adds moisture.

The step that matters

Gradually add the cream while stirring. Adding cream slowly while stirring keeps the mixture smooth and evenly combined. Dumping it in at once can lead to lumps or a thin, uneven sauce, since the spinach and butter need to blend gradually into the cream.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Spinachthe original
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Leekfits less well
  4. Capsicumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, cream, pepper, 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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