Skip to main content
Main

Split Pea Soup

A hearty soup made with split green peas, ham, vegetables, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Split Pea Soup

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Wash the split peas and place them in a 3-quart saucepan with fresh water, salt, and raw ham.

  2. Bring to a boil over high heat and cook for 15 minutes.

  3. Add the chopped carrot, onions, celery, thyme, bay leaf, sugar, and additional salt to taste.

  4. Cook slowly until the peas reach a thick, creamy consistency.

  5. Pass the mixture through a strainer and return it to the saucepan.

  6. Add boiling water and butter, then bring to a boil again.

Serve

  1. Serve hot, with or without browned bread squares.

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. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Celery + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,193 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Split green peas
Break down during long simmering to thicken the soup into a creamy body.
Raw ham
Releases savory, salty flavor into the broth as it simmers with the peas.
Onions
Build aromatic sweetness and savory depth as they soften in the soup base.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished soup.
Carrot
Adds subtle sweetness and body to the vegetable base.

The step that matters

Cook slowly until thick and creamy. Split peas need a long, gentle simmer to soften fully and release starch; rushing or boiling hard can leave them grainy and unevenly thickened, and the soup can scorch on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, carrot, onion, celery, thyme, sugar, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, carrot, onion, celery, thyme, sugar, 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.

More split pea soup recipes

Baked 20Yellow 4 See all 228 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesGreen PeasGreen Peas229 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipes