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Cream of Spinach

A creamy spinach soup made with butter, stock, and a touch of nutmeg and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Cream of Spinach

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 ↓

Cream of Spinach

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Pick, wash, and boil enough spinach to measure 1 pint when cooked, then chop and puree it into a soft paste.

Make the soup

  1. In a saucepan, combine the spinach paste with 4 ounces of butter, nutmeg, and salt.

  2. Cook and stir for 10 minutes.

  3. Add 2 quarts of strong stock and bring to a boil.

  4. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve.

  5. Return the strained mixture to the heat.

  6. When it's about to boil, mix in 1 tablespoon of butter and 1 teaspoon of sugar.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Nutmeg + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

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

Nutmeg and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 23,364 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Spinach
Gives the soup its green colour, body and vegetable flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel as it emulsifies into the soup.
Strong stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour and thins the puree.

The step that matters

Returning the strained mixture to the heat and adding butter and sugar near boiling. Once the butter is stirred in near boiling, it can separate or the soup can scorch if overheated. Holding it just below a boil keeps the emulsion smooth and the green colour bright.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, nutmeg, 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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