Skip to main content
Main

Spinach

A spinach soup made with butter, onion, flour, pepper, nutmeg, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Spinach

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Pick off the roots and decayed leaves from the spinach and wash it in several waters.

  2. Place the spinach in a large kettle with plenty of boiling salted water and boil until tender.

  3. Drain the spinach and chop it very fine.

Make the soup

  1. Melt the butter in a skillet, add the chopped onion, and fry until light brown.

  2. Add the flour and stir until light brown, then add the chopped spinach, pepper, nutmeg, and soup stock.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil.

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.

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. Spinach + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach
Forms the body of the soup and provides its green color and vegetable flavor.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and carries the flavor of the onion as it fries.
Chopped onion
Adds savory depth as it browns in the butter.
Soup stock
Supplies the liquid that makes the soup and carries the other flavors.

The step that matters

Frying the onion and flour until light brown. Browning the onion and flour in butter builds toasty flavor and begins the thickening. Stopping too early leaves a raw, floury taste, while going too far can scorch and taste bitter.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, butter, pepper, nutmeg. 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.

You might also like

Cream of SpinachCream of Spinach29 recipesSpinach and EggsSpinach and Eggs8 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes