Skip to main content
Main

Vegetable Puree

A puree of peas and spinach mixed with milk, served with bread sticks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Peas and spinach work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 550 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Vegetable Puree

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Press the cooked peas and spinach through a sieve, ensuring all pulp is extracted.

Make the puree

  1. Heat the pressed vegetables with 2 cups of milk.

  2. Season with coarse sea salt to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve with bread sticks.

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.

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. Peas + spinachtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together550 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Peas + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together804 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexyl acetate (fruity, apple).

  4. Spinach + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Milk + peastop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,309 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

What each ingredient does

Peas
Pureed peas give the puree its body and mild sweetness.
Spinach
Pureed spinach adds green color and an earthy, grassy flavor.
Milk
Milk thins the puree and adds creaminess and richness.

The step that matters

Press the vegetables through a sieve. Pressing removes the fibrous skins and tough cell debris. Any leftover fibre would make the puree grainy or stringy, so extracting all the pulp is what gives a smooth texture.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, peas, bread. 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.

More vegetable puree recipes

Soup 4 See all 17 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesGreen PeasGreen Peas229 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes