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Stewed Green Peas

A simple dish of boiled green peas cooked with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Stewed Green Peas

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peas

  1. Boil 2-3 pints of young green peas in a saucepan of water until tender.

  2. Drain the peas in a colander and let them dry.

Make the butter and flour base

  1. Melt 2 ounces of butter in a separate pan.

  2. Stir in 2 ounces of flour and cook for 5 minutes.

Finish

  1. If the pods are clean and fresh, boil them first, then add the peas.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Peas + flourtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,837 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

Young green peas
Form the main body of the dish and give its fresh, sweet flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour, and fat helps the flour form a smooth base.
Flour
Cooked in butter, it thickens the dish and gives it a smooth, body-rich texture.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the butter for 5 minutes. Flour must be cooked in the melted butter before thickening. This cooks out the raw starch taste and lets the starch swell smoothly without lumps.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Macadamia nutfits better
  3. Cashew nutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour. 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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