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Spinach Soup

A soup made with boiled spinach, butter, flour, onion, parsley, stock, glaze, sugar, and salt, served with fried bread croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Spinach Soup

Why it works: Spinach and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,025 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Spinach Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the spinach by boiling it for 6-7 minutes.

  2. Press out the water and place the spinach in a stewpan.

Make the soup

  1. Add butter, flour, chopped onion, and parsley; fry briefly.

  2. Pour in the stock and let it simmer for 20 minutes.

  3. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve back into the stewpan.

  4. Add a small pat of butter, glaze, sugar, and salt; let it boil.

Serve

  1. Serve with croutons of fried bread.

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 + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Spinach + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,336 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Spinach + flourtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach
Forms the main body and green colour of the soup once boiled and sieved.
Butter
Carries flavour and adds richness when melted and used to fry the aromatics.
Flour
Thickens the soup by binding with the fat and stock as it cooks.
Onion
Adds savoury depth as it softens in the butter.
Stock
Provides the liquid base and savoury flavour for the soup.

The step that matters

Passing the mixture through a fine sieve. Pushing the cooked spinach through a fine sieve breaks down its fibres to give a smooth texture; skipping or rushing this leaves the soup grainy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (spinach, butter, flour, parsley, sugar, bread):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, butter, flour, parsley, sugar, 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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