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Green Soup

A spinach soup flavored with onion, cayenne pepper, and salt, finished with croutons of fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Green Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Boil the spinach in enough water to cover until very tender.

  2. Strain the liquid through a sieve and add water to make 1 pint.

  3. Combine the spinach liquid with 1 pint of stock.

  4. Flavor with chopped onion, cayenne pepper, and salt or celery salt.

Serve

  1. Add croutons of fried bread and serve hot.

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. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  2. Spinach + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together616 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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 flavor once boiled and strained into the liquid.
Stock
Adds savory depth and volume to the soup base.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and savory flavor when chopped into the soup.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, pepper, celery, 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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