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Cream of Pea Soup

A thick soup made from soaked peas, stock, flour, sugar, and salt, then canned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Cream of Pea Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peas

  1. Soak the dry peas overnight.

  2. Cook the peas until soft, then mash them fine.

  3. Add the mashed peas to the soup stock and bring to a boil.

  4. Pass the boiling liquid through a fine sieve.

Thicken the soup

  1. Make a smooth paste with the flour and add it to the soup stock along with the sugar and salt.

  2. Cook until the soup begins to thicken.

Pack and process

  1. Pack the soup in glass jars or tin cans.

  2. Partially seal the glass jars and cap the tin cans.

  3. Process for 90 minutes using a hot-water bath, 80 minutes with a water-seal outfit, 70 minutes with a 5‑lb steam‑pressure outfit, or 45 minutes with a pressure cooker.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Peas + flourtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,837 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Peas + sugartop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Dry peas
Form the main body and thick, earthy flavour of the soup once cooked and mashed.
Flour
Thickens the soup into a smooth, creamy texture as it cooks.
Soup stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the peas and other ingredients.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the savoury pea flavour.

The step that matters

Make a smooth paste with the flour before adding it. Flour added as lumps or directly to hot liquid clumps and will not dissolve evenly. Mixing it into a smooth paste first lets the starch disperse so the soup thickens evenly without lumps.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Milletfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, 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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