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Small Green Peas

Peas cooked in butter with parsley, green onions, starch, sugar, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper 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 ↓

Small Green Peas

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the peas

  1. In a casserole, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the peas, parsley, and green onions; sauté for a few minutes.

  3. Sprinkle the peas with starch and add boiling water to just cover them.

  4. Boil for 15 minutes until the sauce reduces.

  5. Season with salt and pepper, then let it reduce further.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove from heat and stir in the walnut-sized butter and powdered sugar until melted.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + walnuttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together865 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Peas + parsleytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked 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

Green peas
Form the main body of the dish, cooked tender in the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy finish to the sauce.
Starch
Thickens the cooking liquid into a light sauce that coats the peas.
Powdered sugar
Adds gentle sweetness that balances the savoury seasoning.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce with starch. Starch must be sprinkled over the peas before the boiling water is added so it disperses evenly; added late it can clump and leave lumps. Reducing the liquid further concentrates the flavour and firms the sauce.

Swap the peas

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, onion, pepper, sugar, walnut. 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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