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Spinach Soup

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 well and cook it in 2 cups of water with the onion and seasoning until soft.

  2. Rub the cooked spinach and onion through a sieve.

Make the soup

  1. Mix the wheat flour with the melted butter.

  2. Stir the spinach mixture into the butter and flour, then add the milk.

  3. Bring to a boil and add the lemon juice last.

  4. If the soup is too thick, add a little water.

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. Milk + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  5. Spinach + wheattop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together149 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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 as it cooks down and is sieved.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and smooths the texture.
Wheat flour
Thickens the soup by swelling in the butter and milk as it heats.
Milk
Adds creaminess and body, softening the soup's flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the spinach.
Onion
Adds savoury depth as it softens during cooking.

The step that matters

Bring to a boil and add the lemon juice last. Flour thickens only when the mixture reaches a boil, so it must be brought up to temperature first. Adding acid last, off the heat's main work, keeps the lemon's bright flavour from being dulled by long cooking.

Swap the onion

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

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

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

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