Skip to main content
Main

Split Pea Soup

A hearty soup made from dried split peas, water, butter, flour, sugar, salt, and white pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Split Pea Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peas

  1. Pick over and wash the peas.

  2. Soak the peas overnight or for several hours in cold water.

Cook and strain

  1. Put the soaked peas in a pot with 3 pints of fresh cold water and bring to a boil.

  2. Let the peas simmer until dissolved.

  3. Add more water as needed to maintain 3 pints of liquid.

  4. Rub the peas through a strainer.

  5. Return the strained soup to the pot.

  6. Add water, stock, milk, or cream to achieve the desired consistency.

Thicken and serve

  1. Mix the butter and flour together and add the mixture to the boiling soup.

  2. Season with salt and pepper.

  3. Simmer for an additional 10 minutes before serving.

  4. Serve with fried diced bread.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. 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

Dried split peas
Break down during simmering to give the soup its body and thick texture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor and smoothing the mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the soup slightly when cooked with butter and stirred into the boiling liquid.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour mixture to the boiling soup. Flour clumps if dropped in raw or added without being blended with fat first. Mixing it with butter and stirring it into hot liquid helps it disperse evenly and thicken smoothly.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Jalapenofits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, butter, flour, 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.

More split pea soup recipes

Baked 20Yellow 4 See all 228 →

You might also like

Green PeasGreen Peas229 recipesGreen Peas SoupGreen Peas Soup35 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes