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Cream of Spinach

A creamy spinach soup made with butter, nutmeg, salt, stock, and sugar.

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

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Pick, wash, and boil enough spinach to measure 1 pint when cooked, then chop and pound it into a soft paste.

Make the soup

  1. In a stewpan, combine the spinach paste, 4 ounces of butter, nutmeg, and salt. Cook and stir for 10 minutes.

  2. Add 2 quarts of strong stock and bring to a boil, then strain the mixture.

  3. Return the strained mixture to the heat, and just before boiling, mix in 1 tablespoon of butter and 1 teaspoon of sugar.

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 + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Nutmeg + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Spinach + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,583 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

Nutmeg and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 23,364 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, green colour and earthy flavour of the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety mouthfeel to the soup.
Strong stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the spinach and sets the savoury depth.
Granulated sugar
Rounds out the flavour and softens the slight bitterness of the spinach.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and sugar just before boiling. Adding fat and sugar off the boil keeps the butter emulsified and glossy, since prolonged boiling can make it separate and dull the flavour.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, nutmeg, sugar. 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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