Skip to main content
Main

Spinach Dressed with Cream

A spinach dish tossed with butter, cream, sugar, and nutmeg, served warm.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 Dressed with Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Boil the spinach until tender, then press out the water.

  2. Chop the spinach finely and place it in a saucepan with the butter.

  3. Simmer and stir until the butter is well mixed with the spinach.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the heated cream, sugar, and nutmeg, stirring gently.

  2. Serve on a warm dish, garnished with croutons or slices of hard-boiled egg.

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. Cream + nutmegtop 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 carries the creamy sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping the chopped spinach become smooth and glossy.
Cream
Adds moisture and a smooth, rich texture to the spinach.
Sugar
Adds a slight sweetness that balances the bitterness of the spinach.

The step that matters

Pressing out the water after boiling. Spinach holds a lot of water. If it is not pressed dry, the added cream will thin the dish and it will not thicken or hold together well.

Swap the spinach

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

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

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

You might also like

Spinach SoupSpinach Soup50 recipesCream of SpinachCream of Spinach29 recipesSpinach and EggsSpinach and Eggs8 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes