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Spinach a LA Crème

A sautéed spinach dish finished with butter, cream, nutmeg, and powdered sugar, served with fried croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 Crème

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Boil the spinach in a saucepan of hot water with salt until tender.

  2. Drain and squeeze out all the water.

  3. Rub the spinach through a coarse wire sieve into a stewpan.

Finish and serve

  1. Add enough butter to moisten the spinach, salt, and nutmeg, then stir with a wooden spoon until hot.

  2. Add cream, a pat of butter, and powdered sugar, stirring well over the heat.

  3. Serve with fried croutons.

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. Nutmeg + creamtop 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 body of the dish, and its fine texture comes from being pressed through a sieve.
Butter
Moistens the spinach and adds richness and a smooth, glossy finish.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture that softens the spinach.
Powdered sugar
Adds a touch of sweetness that balances the savoury spinach.

The step that matters

Rubbing the spinach through the sieve. Squeezing out all the water first keeps the purée from being watery, and pressing it through a fine sieve breaks down the fibres for a smooth, even texture.

Swap the spinach

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

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

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