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Green Pea Soup with Whipped Cream

A soup of boiled green peas, milk, flour, butter, and parsley, served with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Green Pea Soup with Whipped Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peas

  1. Boil the peas until very soft.

  2. Mash the peas through a colander.

Make the soup

  1. In a double boiler, bring the milk to a boil.

  2. In a separate bowl, rub the butter and flour together until smooth.

  3. Add the butter‑flour mixture to the boiling milk.

  4. Stir in the mashed peas.

  5. Boil for an additional 15 minutes.

  6. Stir in the chopped parsley.

Serve

  1. Serve in cups topped with whipped cream.

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

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Peas + parsleytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,885 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

Flour and butter 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

Fresh green peas
Provide the main body and flavour of the soup once mashed.
Milk
Forms the liquid base and gives the soup a creamy, smooth body.
Flour
Thickens the milk as it heats, giving the soup a fuller texture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, smoothing the flour and adding flavour.

The step that matters

Adding the butter‑flour mixture to the boiling milk. Flour clumps if dropped into hot liquid unevenly. Rubbing it smooth with butter first and adding it while the milk is boiling and stirred helps it disperse and thicken evenly without lumps.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, butter, parsley, cream. 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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