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Cream of Green Peas

A creamy soup made from boiled green peas, milk, butter, and flour, seasoned with parsley, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Cream of Green Peas

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peas

  1. Shell the peas.

  2. Wash the pods.

  3. Cover the pods with cold water.

  4. Boil the pods until tender.

  5. Drain the pods and reserve the water.

  6. Return the water to the kettle.

  7. Boil the peas until done.

  8. Take out one cup of peas.

Make the soup

  1. Mash the remaining peas through a sieve.

  2. Add three cups of milk to the mashed peas.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  4. Mix in butter and flour rubbed to a paste, along with parsley, pepper, and salt.

  5. Optionally add a touch of sugar and mint.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately 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. Parsley + peppertop 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 + minttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,198 recipes

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

  4. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Pepper + minttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,372 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

Green peas
Form the main body and sweet flavor, and their mashed starch gives the soup its thickness.
Milk
Adds creaminess and a soft, rich body to the mashed peas.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the soup as its starch swells when heated in the liquid.

The step that matters

Mix in butter and flour rubbed to a paste. Dry flour added straight to hot liquid forms lumps, because the outer starch swells before the inside can hydrate. Rubbing it into a paste with butter coats the granules so they disperse evenly as the soup heats and thickens.

Swap the mint

The recipe marks mint as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peas, milk, butter, flour, parsley, pepper, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, milk, butter, flour, parsley, pepper, 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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