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Cream Pea Soup

A creamy soup made from peas, butter, flour, milk, and optional onion, eggs, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Cream Pea Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peas

  1. Cook the peas in water until tender, then drain and reserve the cooking water.

  2. Pass the peas through a potato press, adding some of the reserved water to achieve a smooth consistency.

  3. If using, cook the onion with the peas.

Make the soup

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter, then stir in the flour to make a roux.

  2. Gradually add the milk, simmer for 10 minutes, then stir in the pea pulp.

  3. Season with salt and pepper.

  4. If desired, stir in beaten eggs mixed with cream or creamed butter just before serving.

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 + milktop 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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Peas + oniontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

Peas
Form the body and main flavour of the soup once passed into a pulp.
Butter
Enriches the base and, with the flour, forms the roux that thickens the soup.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, creamy base when cooked in the butter.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid that the pea pulp is stirred into.
Eggs
Optional; added at the end to enrich the soup's richness and texture.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs and cream. Eggs thicken when heated, so they should be stirred in off the heat or just before serving and not allowed to boil. Boiling can curdle the eggs and leave the soup grainy.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peas, butter, flour, milk, pepper, egg, cream):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, butter, flour, milk, pepper, egg, 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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