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Cream of Spinach Soup

A soup made from cooked spinach, butter, nutmeg, salt, stock, finished with butter and served with hard‑boiled eggs.

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

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 Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Pick spinach.

  2. Wash spinach.

  3. Boil spinach until it yields 1 pint when cooked.

Make the soup

  1. Combine spinach with 4 tablespoons of butter, nutmeg, and salt in a stewpan.

  2. Cook for about 20 minutes. Stir.

  3. Add 2 quarts of strong stock.

  4. Bring to a boil.

  5. Rub the mixture through a sieve.

  6. Return to the heat.

  7. Just before boiling, mix in 1 tablespoon of butter.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with chopped hard-boiled eggs in each plate.

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 + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Nutmeg + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together24,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Spinach + eggtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,323 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Nutmeg and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 24,744 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
Forms the body and green colour of the soup once cooked and puréed.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the soup.
Strong stock
Provides the liquid base and savoury depth of the soup.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture through a sieve. Spinach fibres stay coarse unless the cooked mixture is pressed through a sieve, so skipping or rushing this step leaves the soup gritty rather than smooth.

Swap the spinach

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, 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.

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