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Petits Pois À LA Française

A simple side dish of peas cooked with butter, salt, lettuce, parsley, scallions, savory, and cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and 1,483 recipes mention both. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Petits Pois À LA Française

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and drain the peas.

  2. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

Cook

  1. Add the peas, salt, lettuce, parsley, scallions, savory, and cloves.

  2. Cook gently until the peas are tender, stirring occasionally.

  3. Serve warm as a side dish.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Peas + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,293 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Lettuce + clovetop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together486 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Peas + parsleytop 13% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together1,885 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh peas
Form the main body of the dish and become tender with gentle cooking.
Unsalted butter
Adds richness and moisture, coating the peas as they cook.
Hearts of lettuce
Soften as they cook and add moisture and a mild, sweet body to the peas.

The step that matters

Cook gently until the peas are tender. Low, gentle heat softens the peas evenly without browning the butter or toughening the skins. Stirring occasionally keeps the vegetables from scorching on the bottom of the pan.

Flavor stand-ins for the clove

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

  1. Tarragonbetter flavor fit
  2. Capersbetter flavor fit
  3. Thymebetter flavor fit
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, butter, lettuce, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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