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How to Cook Dried Peas to Resemble and Taste Like Fresh Green Peas

This dish cooks dried green peas to taste like fresh green peas using sugar, soda, mint, butter, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Peas and mint are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,137 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

How to Cook Dried Peas to Resemble and Taste Like Fresh Green Peas

Ingredients

Directions

Soak the peas

  1. Soak peas in 1 quart of cold water for 12 hours.

Cook and finish

  1. In a pan, combine soaked peas with 3 pints of boiling water, adding the soda, mint, and sugar.

  2. Boil for 20 minutes to 1 hour, ensuring no water remains to drain off.

  3. Remove from heat, add butter, pepper, and salt, and shake well.

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 + minttop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Mint + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,372 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Peas + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Peas + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,887 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Dried green peas
Provide the main body; their starch softens during cooking into a thick, mashable texture.
Bicarbonate of soda
Alkaline salt that helps the peas soften faster and break down more fully.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, silkier mouthfeel to the cooked peas.
Lumps sugar
Adds a little sweetness that rounds out the savoury flavour of the peas.
Mint
Contributes a fresh, aromatic herbal note to the cooked peas.

The step that matters

Boil until fully tender with no water left to drain. Dried peas only soften when their starch fully gelatinises in hot water. Because the cooking liquid is not drained, the peas must reach full tenderness while absorbing the water, so the texture is right and the mixture does not turn watery or stick.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peas, sugar, butter, pepper):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Tarragonfits about as well
  3. Parsleyfits about as well
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, sugar, butter, 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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