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Pea Soup

A hearty soup made from split peas, salt pork, and seasonings, served with buttered stale bread squares.

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

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Pea Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peas

  1. Soak the split peas overnight in water.

  2. In the morning, combine the soaked peas and salt pork in a pot.

  3. Boil slowly for several hours, adding water as needed.

  4. Strain the mixture through a sieve.

  5. Season the soup with salt, sugar, and nutmeg.

Make the croutons

  1. Toast the stale bread until brown.

  2. Spread butter on the toasted bread.

  3. Cut the buttered bread into small squares.

Serve

  1. Serve the bread squares with 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.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Peas + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together804 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexyl acetate (fruity, apple).

  3. Pork + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Nutmeg + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savory flavor that carries through the broth.
Stale bread
Dries out and toasts to a crisp texture that contrasts with the soup.
Butter
Adds fat and richness and helps the toasted bread brown.

The step that matters

Boil slowly for several hours, adding water as needed. A gentle simmer lets the peas soften fully and break down into a smooth soup. A hard boil can scorch the bottom of the pot and evaporate liquid too fast, so keep the pot topped up with water.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, sugar, nutmeg, bread, butter):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Walnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, sugar, nutmeg, bread, 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.

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