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Pea Soup Without Meat

A hearty split pea soup with turnips, carrots, celery, potatoes, onions, butter, flour, and seasonings, served with crisp fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Pea Soup Without Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Boil the split peas in 2 quarts of water for 4 to 5 hours until tender.

  2. Add the turnips, carrots, celery, and potatoes and cook until tender.

  3. Pulp the mixture through a sieve.

  4. Fry the onion in butter.

  5. Add flour to thicken the soup.

  6. Season the soup with salt and pepper to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve with crisp fried 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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Split peas
Break down during long boiling to give the soup its body and thickness.
Potatoes
Break down when cooked and pulped, adding starch that thickens the soup.
Turnips
Soften during cooking and pulp into the soup, adding bulk and body.
Butter
Carries the onion's flavor and adds richness to the soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup by swelling with liquid as it cooks.

The step that matters

Pulp the mixture through a sieve. Vegetables and peas must be fully cooked first, or the pulped soup will be grainy and thin. Pressing them through a sieve breaks them into a smooth purée that gives the soup its body.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, carrot, celery, potato, onion, butter, flour):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Chickpeafits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, carrot, celery, potato, onion, butter, flour. 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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