Name: Green Peas
Ingredients: 2 cups fresh green peas; ½ teaspoon coarse sea salt; 2 tablespoons butter

Why it works: Peas and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,887 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Green Peas

Ingredients

2 cups fresh green peas
½ teaspoon coarse sea salt
2 tablespoons butter

Directions

Prepare

Pick over the peas, but do not wash them.
Place the peas in a double coarse lace bag or a fine netted bag.

Cook

Boil water in a pot and add the bag of peas.
Boil for 30 minutes.
Remove the bag from the water and transfer the peas to a dish.
Add salt and butter to the peas.

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.

Peas + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,887 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh green peas: Form the main body of the dish, providing the bulk and the sweet, vegetal flavour.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, giving the peas a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.

“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.