Name: Peas, Green, Preserved
Ingredients: fresh green peas; water; 1 ounce butter; coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')

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, Green, Preserved

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

fresh green peas
water
1 ounce butter
coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')

Directions

Prepare the peas

Shell the peas when fully grown but not old.
Boil the peas in water for 10 minutes, then drain well.

Dry and store

Spread the peas on tins and place them in a cool oven to harden.
Once done, place the peas in paper bags, tie securely, and hang in a dry warm room until needed.
Before using, soak the peas in water with 1 ounce of butter added.

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.

Peas + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,887 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh green peas: The main ingredient, dried and preserved so they keep until needed.
Butter: Added to the soaking water to add richness and fat to the rehydrated peas.

“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.