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Pea Soup

A pea soup made with butter, anchovies, pepper, salt, herbs, beet root, spinach, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Pea Soup

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Pea Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the peas until they are a pulp and strain them.

  2. In a stewpan, melt the butter and add the anchovies, pepper, salt, parsley, mint, beet root, and spinach.

  3. Stew until tender.

  4. Add the pulped peas to achieve the desired soup consistency.

  5. Stir in the loaf sugar, bring to a boil, 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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  3. Parsley + spinachtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + spinachtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Parsley + minttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,198 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Peas
Form the pulped body of the soup and give it its main flavour and thickness.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying the flavours of the herbs and aromatics.
Anchovies
Add a savoury, salty depth that rounds out the soup's flavour.
Loaf sugar
Adds a touch of sweetness to balance the savoury flavours.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Cashew nutfits better
  3. Lentilsfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, parsley, mint, spinach, sugar. 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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