Skip to main content
Main

Split Pea Soup

A thickened split pea soup made with butter, flour, sugar, salt, and white pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Split Pea Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peas

  1. Soak the peas overnight in cold water.

  2. In a pot, boil the soaked peas in 3 pints of fresh cold water until dissolved, adding more water as it boils away.

  3. Once the peas are soft, strain them through a sieve.

  4. Add enough water, stock, milk, or cream to achieve a thin cream consistency.

Make the sauce and finish

  1. In a separate pan, cook the flour and butter together.

  2. Stir in the salt, pepper, and sugar, adding a little of the strained soup until smooth.

  3. Combine the sauce with the soup and simmer for 10 minutes.

  4. Serve with croutons.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Dried split peas
Break down during boiling to thicken the soup and give it body.
Flour
Cooked with butter to form a roux that thickens the soup smoothly.
Butter
Fat that cooks with the flour to form the roux and adds richness.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour and butter into a sauce. Flour must be cooked with the butter before it is stirred in, or the mixture stays raw-tasting and can form lumps. Adding a little hot soup first helps the sauce blend smoothly.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Jalapenofits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

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

More split pea soup recipes

Baked 20Yellow 4 See all 228 →

You might also like

Green PeasGreen Peas229 recipesGreen Peas SoupGreen Peas Soup35 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes