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Pease Soup and Pickled Pork

A hearty soup made from split peas, celery, onions, marjoram, and pickled pork.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and marjoram match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 615 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Pease Soup and Pickled Pork

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the pickled pork in water overnight if it is too salty.

Make the soup

  1. Combine split peas, chopped celery, peeled onions, sweet marjoram, and water in a large pot.

  2. Boil gently for 2 hours.

  3. Add the pork and continue boiling until it is cooked through.

Serve

  1. Remove the pork, wash it in hot water, and serve it whole or cut into pieces in the soup.

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. Celery + marjoramtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together615 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

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

  4. Onion + marjoramtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,056 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Peas + celerytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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 simmering to thicken the soup and give it body.
Pickled pork
Adds salty, savoury flavour and richness to the broth as it cooks.
Celery
Adds aromatic, savoury depth to the broth during simmering.
Onions
Release sweetness and savoury flavour into the broth as they cook.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 2 hours. A gentle simmer lets the split peas soften and break down slowly, thickening the soup evenly. A hard rolling boil can scorch the bottom of the pot and make the peas cloudy or unevenly textured.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, celery, onion, marjoram):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, celery, onion, marjoram. 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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