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Spinach with Cream

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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

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, then strain and chop finely.

Make the creamed spinach

  1. Melt butter in a skillet. Add spinach.

  2. Stir until moisture evaporates.

  3. Add salt, sugar, nutmeg (if using), flour, and cream. Simmer for 15 minutes.

  4. Pass the mixture through a sieve. Keep warm.

Fry the bread and serve

  1. Cut bread into fingers. Fry bread in oil until golden.

  2. Arrange fried bread 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. 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. Nutmeg + flourtop 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

Spinach
Forms the main body of the dish and gives its green colour and flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and giving the mixture a smooth texture.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the cooked spinach and cream into a smooth, coating sauce.
Heavy cream
Adds moisture and richness, softening the sauce and making it creamy.
Bread
Fried until golden, it adds crisp contrast to the soft spinach.

The step that matters

Stir until moisture evaporates. Spinach releases a lot of water. If it is not driven off before the flour and cream go in, the sauce will be thin and watery and will not thicken properly.

“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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