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Spinach Soup

A soup made with fresh spinach, butter, flour, chicken broth, and cream, served with fried or baked bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Spinach Soup

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 Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the stalks from the spinach, wash, and clip it.

Make the soup

  1. In a 3-quart stewing pan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the spinach and stir for 5 minutes.

  3. Stir in the flour and cook for another 3-4 minutes.

  4. Pour in the chicken broth and bring to a boil.

  5. Reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes.

  6. Stir in the cream before serving.

Serve

  1. Serve with fried or baked 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. 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 + flourtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Spinach + chickentop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,146 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Provides the main body and green flavour of the soup.
Butter
Adds fat and richness and helps cook the spinach gently.
Flour
Thickens the soup by binding with butter and liquid as it cooks.
Chicken broth
Forms the liquid base that the spinach simmers in.
Cream
Adds smoothness and richness to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the butter and spinach. Cooking the flour for 3-4 minutes before adding the broth cooks out its raw taste and lets it thicken the soup smoothly instead of forming lumps.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Onionfits about as well
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, chicken, 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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