Skip to main content
Main

Spinach Soup

A creamy spinach soup made with butter, milk, wheatmeal, lemon juice, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Spinach Soup

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Spinach Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Wash the spinach thoroughly.

  2. Cook the spinach and onion in 1 pint of water with pepper and salt until the spinach is soft.

  3. Rub the mixture through a sieve to create a smooth puree.

Make the soup

  1. Mix the wheatmeal with the melted butter until smooth.

  2. Stir the spinach puree into the wheatmeal mixture.

  3. Add the milk to the mixture.

  4. Bring the soup to a boil.

  5. Add the lemon juice.

  6. If the soup is too thick, add a little water to reach desired consistency.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Spinach + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Spinach + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Spinach + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,336 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach
Forms the body and green colour of the soup once cooked and puréed.
Wheatmeal
Thickens the soup as it cooks with the butter and liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and smoothing the thickening base.
Milk
Adds creaminess and mild sweetness to the puréed soup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the spinach.

The step that matters

Stirring the wheatmeal into the butter until smooth. Starch clumps form if flour or wheatmeal hits liquid unevenly; mixing it smoothly with fat first lets it disperse so the soup thickens without lumps.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (spinach, butter, milk, lemon, pepper):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, butter, milk, lemon, pepper. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCream of SpinachCream of Spinach29 recipesSpinach and EggsSpinach and Eggs8 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes