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Green Pea Soup

A soup made from green peas, butter, flour, salt, and sugar, topped with butter‑flour dumplings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Green Pea Soup

Why it works: Flour and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,623 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Green Pea Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Place the peas in a pot with cold water and cook until tender.

  2. Season the cooked peas with butter, flour, salt, and sugar to taste.

Make and cook the dumplings

  1. For the dumplings, bring ½ cup of water to a boil in a skillet.

  2. Add ½ cup of butter and stir in enough flour to form a stiff, smooth paste.

  3. Let the mixture cool, then add the eggs, salt, and nutmeg.

  4. Drop spoonfuls of the dumpling mixture into the soup and cook until they rise to the surface.

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. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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
Form the main body of the soup and give it its green color and flavor.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor in both the soup and the dumplings.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the soup and, with butter and water, forms the stiff dumpling paste.
Eggs
Bind the cooled dumpling mixture and help it set and hold its shape when cooked.

The step that matters

Let the dumpling mixture cool before adding the eggs. If the paste is still hot, the eggs can scramble or cook unevenly instead of blending smoothly. Cooling lets the eggs mix in evenly and bind the dumpling.

Swap the peas

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, sugar, egg, nutmeg. 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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