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Spinach a LA Creme

Spinach à la Crème is sautéed spinach cooked with butter and cream, seasoned with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and topped with poached 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 a LA Creme

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Clean and boil the spinach until tender. Drain and press dry.

  2. Chop the spinach very fine on a board.

Make the creamed spinach

  1. Melt a lump of butter in a saucepan over medium heat until light brown.

  2. Add the chopped spinach and heat through.

  3. Slowly incorporate the rich cream.

  4. Season with coarse sea salt, black pepper, and grated nutmeg.

Serve

  1. Serve on a hot platter, garnished with poached eggs.

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

Spinach
Forms the main body of the dish and gives its green colour and earthy flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and a nutty, browned flavour when melted until light brown.
Rich cream
Adds moisture and silky texture, binding the chopped spinach into a smooth creamed mixture.
Poached eggs
Add soft, runny yolk that enriches the dish when broken into the spinach.

The step that matters

Incorporating the rich cream. Adding cream slowly, over gentle heat, lets it emulsify smoothly into the spinach. Adding it too fast or at high heat can cause it to separate or turn grainy.

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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