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Peas

Peas boiled with salt and soda, then sautéed with butter, sugar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Peas and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,887 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Peas

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Shell the peas.

  2. Boil a saucepan full of warm water.

Cook the peas

  1. Once boiling, add the shelled peas, salt, and carbonate of soda.

  2. Boil for 15 to 20 minutes, uncovered, until soft.

  3. Drain the peas in a colander.

Finish and serve

  1. In a sauté pan, combine the peas with butter.

  2. Sprinkle with salt and castor sugar, tossing gently over heat for a few minutes without frying.

  3. Serve on a hot vegetable dish.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Peas + sugartop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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 of the dish, softening during boiling to a tender texture.
Butter
Adds richness and a glossy coating that carries flavour across the peas.
Carbonate of soda
Raises the water's alkalinity, helping the peas soften more quickly and stay bright green.
Castor sugar
Adds gentle sweetness that balances the savoury salt and the vegetable flavour.

The step that matters

Tossing without frying. Tossing gently over heat for only a few minutes warms the peas through and lets the butter coat them. Longer or hotter cooking would brown the butter and toughen the peas.

Swap the peas

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, 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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