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Cream of Spinach

A creamy soup made from boiled spinach, butter, stock, nutmeg, salt, and sugar, served with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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. Wash and boil the spinach until tender, then chop and pound it into a soft paste.

  2. Combine the spinach paste with 4 ounces of butter, nutmeg, and salt.

  3. Cook and stir the mixture for about 10 minutes.

Make the soup

  1. Add 2 quarts of stock to the mixture and bring to a boil.

  2. Rub the mixture through a strainer.

  3. Return the strained mixture to the heat.

  4. Just before boiling, mix in 1 tablespoon of butter and 1 teaspoon of sugar.

Serve

  1. Serve with a tablespoon of whipped cream in each cup or 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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Nutmeg + creamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 flavour of the soup once puréed.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the soup.
Stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the spinach and sets the soup's savoury depth.
Whipped cream
Adds a cool, rich finish on top of the hot soup.

The step that matters

Rubbing the mixture through a strainer. Spinach fibres stay coarse unless the cooked purée is pressed through a strainer, which removes stringy pieces and gives the soup a smooth texture.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Spinachthe original

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