Name: Cream of Spinach Soup
Ingredients: ½ cup White Sauce; ¼ cup water drained from cooked spinach; 2 tablespoons strained spinach

Why it works: Sauce and spinach work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 756 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Cream of Spinach Soup

Ingredients

½ cup White Sauce
¼ cup water drained from cooked spinach
2 tablespoons strained spinach

Directions

Prepare

Prepare the white sauce.
Cook the spinach, then drain and strain it.

Blend and serve

Blend the white sauce with the drained spinach water and strained spinach.
Reheat the mixture and serve.

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.

Sauce + spinachtop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together756 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

White sauce: Provides a smooth, creamy base that gives the soup its body.
Spinach: Adds the main flavour and green colour to the soup.
Spinach cooking water: Carries spinach flavour and adds liquid to thin the soup.

“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.