Skip to main content
Soup

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
Jump to recipe ↓
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.

  2. Chop and pound the cooked spinach into a soft paste.

Make the soup

  1. Combine the spinach paste with 4 ounces of fresh butter, nutmeg, and salt in a stewpan.

  2. Cook and stir the mixture for 10 minutes.

  3. Add 2 quarts of strong stock and bring to a boil.

  4. Strain the mixture.

  5. Return the strained mixture to the heat.

  6. Just before boiling, stir in 1 tablespoon of butter and 1 teaspoon of granulated 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
Forms the bulk and green flavour, thickening into a soft body when pounded and cooked.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the soup a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Strong stock
Supplies the liquid base and savoury depth of the soup.

The step that matters

Returning to the heat and stirring in the final butter and sugar. Boiling after adding butter can cause it to separate and turn greasy, so it is added just before boiling. Sugar lightly rounds the flavour of the spinach.

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.

More cream of spinach recipes

Soup 25 See all 25 →

You might also like

Indian Spiced Potato Soup with Tofu and SpinachIndian Spiced Potato Soup with Tofu and Spinach448 recipesClear Carrot and Bottle Gourd SoupClear Carrot and Bottle Gourd Soup65 recipesMock Bisque SoupMock Bisque Soup51 recipesCream of Asparagus SoupCream of Asparagus Soup42 recipes