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Green Peas, French Style

A French-style side dish of green peas cooked with butter, parsley, onions, lettuce, salt, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,483 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Green Peas, French Style

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine the green peas, butter, parsley, small onions, lettuce, salt, and sugar in a stewpan, then shake the pan.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil over low heat.

  3. Cook for 30 minutes.

  4. Remove the bunch of parsley and serve.

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. Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

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

  2. Peas + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,293 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Onion + lettucetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,562 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Green peas
Form the main body of the dish and provide its fresh, sweet vegetable flavor.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, coating the peas and carrying flavor as they cook.
Lettuce
Softens as it cooks, adding body and a mild sweetness to the liquid.
Small onions
Contribute savory depth and aroma as they soften in the butter and pan juices.

The step that matters

Bring the mixture to a boil over low heat. Heating gently lets the peas and lettuce soften evenly while the butter stays emulsified with the juices. Too rapid a boil can toughen the skins and cook the outside faster than the centre, leaving uneven texture.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peas, butter, parsley, lettuce, sugar):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, butter, parsley, lettuce, sugar. 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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