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Green Pea Soup

A soup made from green peas, water, butter, flour, salt, white pepper, sugar, milk or cream, thickened into a creamy consistency.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Green Pea Soup

Why it works: Butter and milk 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

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the peas

  1. Wash the peas and cook them in 1 pint of boiling water until very soft.

Make the sauce and combine

  1. In a separate pan, melt the butter and stir in the flour to make a white sauce.

  2. Cook the sauce until it thickens to the consistency of thick cream.

  3. If desired, add a pinch of baking soda before thickening.

  4. Combine the cooked peas with the white sauce.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Peas + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,309 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

Green peas
Provide the main body and flavour of the soup once cooked until very soft.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour into the white sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells when heated in melted butter.
Milk or cream
Adds liquid, richness and a smooth, creamy texture to the soup.

The step that matters

Cooking the white sauce until it thickens. Flour must be cooked in the melted butter long enough for its starch to swell and thicken the sauce. Stopping early leaves a raw, pasty taste and a thin, lumpy texture.

Swap the white pepper

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

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

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