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Rosa Luxemburg's spinach and potato soup

Blended within the minute, before the green has a chance to fade

Easy15 min hands-on · 35 min totalServes 2
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A bowl of vivid green spinach and potato soup with a swirl of cream.

Doubles well in a wider pan, though blend it in two batches so it still goes from pan to blender within the minute. Freezes for three months, without the cream, added fresh.

Spinach loses its colour within minutes of any real heat, turning from a bright, saturated green to a tired khaki if it sits in a hot pan a moment too long. The way round it here is speed rather than a trick. Potato does the slow work first, simmered in stock until it collapses at the touch of a spoon, and only then does a full bag of spinach go in, wilted for exactly a minute before the whole pot is blended immediately, while the colour is still at its most vivid. Pushed through a sieve afterwards for a texture with no leaf fibre left in it, then loosened with cream, what lands in the bowl is a genuinely vivid green rather than the murky version most spinach soups end up as.

Tags Vegetarian · Freezes well · Easily fortified

From the chronicle · Wronke, 1917

An enamel bowl of smooth soup with a swirl of cream beside pressed plants between sheets of paper, on a table under a barred window, 1917.

A retired nurse I met in Leipzig in 1973, who had trained under the woman who kept the infirmary at Wronke in the last war but one, said the fortress had been an odd sort of prison. Luxemburg had a cell, a strip of garden, letters in and out, and a herbarium she kept up with a botanist's stubbornness, pressing whatever the walls let in. She wrote to friends about blue tits and the colour of the clouds and barely at all about her stomach, which the infirmary heard about instead. Months of prison bread and no proper walking slow a bowel as surely as they slow everything else, and the doctor's answer was soup. Potato boiled to collapse, then spinach from the garden strip put in for a minute and no longer, and the whole thing rubbed through a sieve so the leaf went in as colour and came out as nothing. The nurse said her teacher had thought it a waste of good spinach. Luxemburg, she said, would have preferred to press it.

The people, places and dates are real. The meal and the conversation are not. Read more about the chronicle.

Ingredients

Contains: Milk, Celery

  • 250 gpotato, peeled and diced
  • 700 mlclear vegetable or chicken stock, strained clear, or a good stock cube
  • 200 gspinach, washed, then wilted soft, blended and sieved smooth
  • 100 mldouble cream
  • salt

Method

  1. Put the potato and stock in a medium saucepan. Bring to a simmer and cook for 20 to 25 minutes, until the potato is completely soft and collapses when pressed with a spoon.

  2. Add the spinach, pushing it down under the liquid, and cook for exactly 1 minute, just until it has wilted and no longer.

  3. Blend the soup immediately, while it is still bright green, until completely smooth.

  4. Push the soup through a fine sieve into a clean pan, pressing hard with the back of a spoon, until no leaf fibre remains in it. Throw away the fibre left in the mesh.

  5. Stir in the cream, warm through gently without boiling, and season with salt.

  6. Ladle into two bowls straight away, while the colour is at its most vivid.

Watch-points

  • Cook the spinach for exactly a minute and blend the soup straight afterwards, rather than letting it sit in the hot pan. Both the colour and the texture depend on speed here.
  • Push the blended soup through a fine sieve and discard everything caught in the mesh, so no leaf fibre reaches the bowl.
  • Peel the potato before it goes in.
  • Use a stock that is clear and strained, with nothing floating in it.
  • Cool the rest quickly, cover it and keep it in the fridge for no more than two days, or one day if you are having chemotherapy. Reheat it once only, to a steam, since long reheating is what turns the green to khaki.

Some hospitals allow spinach cooked soft and blended smooth; the leaflet this book follows does not name it at all. Leave it out if you have been told to, and use an extra 150 g of potato in its place, for a plain potato soup instead.

Stoma note: Like other soups this smooth, the potato in it tends to thicken stoma output a little.

Make it more nourishing

  • Whisk 2 tablespoons of skimmed milk powder into the cold stock before it heats, for about 6 g more protein across the two bowls.
  • Use 150 ml of cream instead of 100 ml for a rounder, richer bowl.
  • Grate 30 g of Cheddar into each bowl while the soup is hot enough to melt it.

Swaps

Instead of fresh spinach, use 200 g of frozen leaf spinach, defrosted and squeezed dry
it is already blanched, so it needs 30 seconds in the pan rather than a minute
Instead of double cream, use crème fraîche, stirred in off the heat
a slightly sharper finish that still loosens the soup the same way

The foods in this recipe

Each of these has a page of its own, with how to prepare it and where hospitals differ.

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