Creamed Spinach with Nutmeg

Nutmeg is the thing. Not the spinach, not the cream, not the butter, though all of those matter. The nutmeg. Grated fresh from a whole nut, it does something to spinach that I've never been able to explain properly. It doesn't taste of nutmeg, exactly. It tastes of spinach that has finally become itself.

This takes ten minutes. Perhaps less. You wilt the spinach, squeeze the water out, warm it through with butter, garlic, and cream, then grate the nutmeg over the top. That's it. There are few better feelings than putting this on the table next to a piece of fish or a roast chicken and watching it disappear before anything else on the plate.

I make this all through autumn and into spring, whenever the spinach at the market looks dark and glossy and alive. Bags of it. It always looks like too much, then it wilts to a fraction of itself and you wish you'd bought more. Buy more. You won't regret it.

I wrote it down in the notebook years ago: spinach, cream, nutmeg, Tuesday. The recipe hasn't changed since, because it doesn't need to. A recipe is a conversation, not a contract, but this one said everything it needed to say the first time.