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Stew the Peas

A buttery pea stew thickened with flour and seasoned with sugar and salt, finished with milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Stew the Peas

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the peas

  1. Melt the butter in a pan and add the peas.

  2. Stew the peas until they produce their own juice.

Season and finish

  1. Dredge in fine meal and moisten with rich broth.

  2. Add sugar and coarse sea salt to taste, and let stew well.

  3. Before serving, stir in the milk and cook for a moment.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Peas + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,309 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  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. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Peas
Form the main body of the stew and release their own juice as they cook.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the peas begin cooking gently in the pan.
Fine meal
Dredging coats the peas, and as it hydrates it thickens the liquid into a stew.
Rich broth
Supplies moisture and savoury flavour, letting the stew simmer into a cohesive dish.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softens the flavour of the stew when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Stirring in the milk before serving. Milk can curdle, separate or scorch if it boils hard or cooks too long, so it is added near the end and only heated briefly.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Cocoafits better
  3. Pecansfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, milk. 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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