Name: Spinach Soup
Ingredients: 1 peck of spinach; 1½ ounces of butter; ¼ teaspoon of salt; 2 tablespoons of cornstarch; water as needed; crackers for serving

Why it works: Spinach and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,583 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Spinach Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Clean and wash the spinach.
Boil the spinach in a little water.

Make the soup

Melt the butter in a pot and add the spinach.
Boil for a while.
Add salt and cornstarch, then enough water to achieve desired consistency.

Serve

Serve with crackers.

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.

Spinach + buttertop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,583 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach: Forms the main body and green flavor of the soup.
Butter: Adds fat and richness to the soup.
Cornstarch: Thickens the soup as it heats, giving it the desired consistency.

“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.