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Spinach Stewed with Cream

A spinach dish cooked with butter, salt, and heavy cream, served with fried paste or bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Spinach Stewed with Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Boil the spinach until tender, then chop it well.

  2. Strain off the excess liquid.

Cook and serve

  1. In a stewpan, combine the chopped spinach with butter and salt.

  2. Stir well as it cooks, gradually adding cream until it reaches a proper thickness.

  3. Garnish with fried paste or bread before 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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Spinach + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Spinach + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  5. Spinach + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,583 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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 color.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the spinach a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Heavy cream
Thickens as it reduces and adds richness and a creamy texture.

The step that matters

Adding the cream gradually while stirring. Cream added all at once can make the mixture loose or split, while adding it slowly and stirring over heat lets it emulsify with the spinach and thicken evenly into a smooth, cohesive sauce.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Onionfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, cream, bread. 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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