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Sauce

Green Pea Sauce

A creamy sauce made with milk, peas, butter, flour, and egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Cook the milk, onion, and parsley in a double boiler for 10 minutes.

  2. Melt the butter, then add the flour and gradually mix in the hot milk.

  3. Strain the mixture back into the double boiler.

  4. Stir in the salt, white pepper, and cold cooked peas.

Finish and serve

  1. Just before serving, add the beaten egg yolk and cook for 1 minute.

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. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Parsley + peastop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,885 recipes

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

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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as it heats.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, coating sauce as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the flour blend smoothly into the milk.
Cold cooked peas
Provide the green colour, sweet flavour and body of the sauce.
Egg yolk
Enriches and further thickens the sauce when gently heated.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk. Egg yolk thickens by setting when heated. If the sauce is too hot or cooked too long after it goes in, the yolk can curdle and turn grainy. Adding it just before serving and cooking only briefly keeps the sauce smooth.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, onion, parsley, butter, flour, peas, egg. 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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