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Asparagus Soup

A soup made from boiled asparagus, optionally flavored with spinach juice, served with toast squares.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Asparagus Soup

Why it works: Asparagus and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 274 recipes. Both carry 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol, which smells clove, smoky. The science ↓

Asparagus Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Cut off the green tops of the asparagus and set half aside.

  2. Boil the remaining asparagus until completely dissolved, then strain the mixture.

  3. Add the reserved asparagus tops to the soup and boil for 20 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. For a deeper green color, pound a handful of spinach, strain the juice, and add it to the soup 10-15 minutes before serving.

  2. Serve the soup with small squares of toast.

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. Asparagus + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together274 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Asparagus
Forms the main body and flavor of the soup as it breaks down into liquid.
Spinach
Adds a deeper green color to the soup.

The step that matters

Adding the spinach juice late. Chlorophyll, the green pigment, breaks down with prolonged heat and turns dull olive. Adding the spinach juice only 10-15 minutes before serving helps keep the green bright.

“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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