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Pea Soup

A simple soup made from peas, onion, butter, flour, milk, and optional rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Pea Soup

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 ↓

Pea Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the peas with the small onion until the onion is cooked.

  2. Strain the mixture through a fruit press.

  3. In a pot, melt the butter and stir in the flour.

  4. Gradually add the milk, stirring until smooth.

  5. Add the strained pea mixture and rice if desired.

  6. Season with salt to taste.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  3. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

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

  4. Peas + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,434 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

Peas
Provide the main body, flavor and thickening starch of the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavor through the soup.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth base with the melted butter.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid that gives the soup its body.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the butter and adding the milk gradually. Flour mixed into fat and then whisked into liquid slowly keeps the base smooth; adding milk all at once can leave lumps of starch that do not dissolve evenly.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Sesamefits better
  3. Beansfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, flour, milk, rice. 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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