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Cream of Spinach Soup

A creamy soup made from cooked spinach blended with a butter, flour, and milk roux, seasoned with salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Cream of Spinach Soup

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Cream of Spinach Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spinach

  1. Prepare spinach by washing and trimming the roots.

  2. Cook spinach in slightly salted water until tender, about 30 minutes.

  3. Drain and chop the spinach, then rub it through a sieve.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt butter, add flour, and salt, stirring until bubbling but not brown.

  2. Gradually add milk, stirring constantly until the mixture thickens.

Combine and serve

  1. Combine the spinach with the sauce and serve.

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

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

  2. Spinach + flourtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Spinach + milktop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together914 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Spinach
Provides the main body, color and green flavor of the soup.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and forms the base of the roux.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce when cooked with the butter.
Milk
Forms the liquid of the sauce and gives it a creamy texture as it thickens.

The step that matters

Cooking the roux without browning. Stirring the butter and flour until bubbling but not brown keeps the flavor mild and lets the flour thicken smoothly. Browning changes the taste and weakens the sauce's thickening power.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

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