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Green Pea Soup with Whipped Cream

A soup of mashed green peas simmered with 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, then mash them through a colander.

Make the soup

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

  2. Rub the butter and flour together, then add to the boiling milk.

  3. Stir in the mashed peas and boil for fifteen minutes.

  4. Add the chopped parsley and serve in cups 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

Green peas
Provide the main body and flavour of the soup when mashed.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the soup and gives it a creamy richness.
Flour
Thickens the soup, giving it body as it cooks with the butter.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the flour blend smoothly into the milk.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour to the boiling milk. Rubbing the butter and flour together first and adding them to boiling milk helps prevent lumps. Flour needs to be cooked in the hot liquid to thicken properly and lose its raw taste.

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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