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Spinach Soup

A vegetable soup made with spinach, turnip, onions, celery, carrots, thyme, parsley, butter, broth, water, and suet dumplings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Spinach Soup

Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Spinach Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. In a stew pot, combine spinach, turnip, onions, celery, carrots, thyme, parsley, butter, and broth or meat water.

  2. Stew until the vegetables are tender.

  3. Work the mixture through a coarse cloth or sieve with a spoon.

Finish and serve

  1. Add fresh water, pepper, and salt to the vegetable pulp and liquor.

  2. Boil together.

  3. Before serving, add the walnut-sized suet dumplings to the soup.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach
Adds leafy body and a green, earthy flavour to the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and gives a smooth mouthfeel.
Onions
Build a sweet, savoury aromatic base as they soften during stewing.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body once stewed and pureed through the sieve.
Turnip
Adds starchy bulk and a mild peppery sweetness to the pureed base.

The step that matters

Stew until the vegetables are tender. Vegetables must be fully softened before straining, because undercooked pieces will not pass easily through the sieve and leave a grainy, less smooth soup.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (spinach, turnip, celery, carrot, thyme, parsley, butter):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, turnip, celery, carrot, thyme, parsley, butter. 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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