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Spinach, with Cream

Creamed spinach made with fresh spinach, butter, cream, nutmeg, and powdered sugar.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Wash the spinach and remove any straws or stalks.

  2. Chop or pound the spinach, then rub it through a coarse sieve.

Cook and serve

  1. In a stewpan, melt 2 ounces of butter over low heat.

  2. Add the spinach, salt, and nutmeg; stir until warm.

  3. Mix in the double cream, 2 ounces of butter, and powdered sugar.

  4. Stir well over heat until combined, then serve.

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 bulk of the dish and gives it its body and green flavour.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the spinach a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Double cream
Adds fat and body, thickening the spinach into a creamy texture.
Powdered sugar
Adds a little sweetness that balances the bitterness of the spinach.

The step that matters

Stir well over heat until combined. Once cream is added, gentle heat keeps it from splitting or curdling. Heating too hard can cause the dairy fat to separate, leaving the sauce greasy and grainy rather than smooth.

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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