Skip to main content
Main

Springtime Soup

A pea soup flavored with parsley, onion, butter, and finished with beaten egg yolks.

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

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Springtime Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Shred the parsley.

  2. In a saucepan, brown the onion in butter.

  3. Add the peas and cover with water.

  4. Season with salt and pepper, and cook until tender.

Finish the soup

  1. Bring the stock to a boil.

  2. Beat the egg yolks with ½ cup of the vegetable liquor.

  3. Add the egg mixture to the hot stock just before removing from heat.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the soup and add richness as they set gently in the hot stock.
Butter
Carries the onion flavor and browns the onion for a deeper savory base.
Peas
Form the main body of the soup and give it its sweet, green flavor.
Stock
Provides the liquid base and most of the savory flavor of the soup.

The step that matters

Adding the egg mixture to the hot stock. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently but can curdle if they boil. Add them just before removing the pan from heat, and keep the soup below a simmer so the yolks thicken smoothly instead of scrambling.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, parsley, egg, onion, butter):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Black-eyed peafits better
  3. Beansfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, parsley, egg, onion, butter. 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.

You might also like

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