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Green Pea Soup

A soup made with peas, pea pods, stock, drippings, parsley, salt, and optional dumplings.

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

Why it works: Peas and parsley are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,885 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Green Pea Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Make soup stock as usual, adding the pea pods.

Cook the peas

  1. Heat the drippings in a stewpan.

  2. Add the peas and chopped parsley, cover, and simmer on low heat.

  3. Add more soup stock as needed until the peas are tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the soup and add the cooked peas.

  2. Season with coarse sea salt and add a lump of loaf sugar.

  3. Add drop dumplings before serving if desired.

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. Peas + parsleytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,885 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Peas + sugartop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Parsley + sugartop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,535 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Pea pods
Simmered in the stock to give it a fresh, green pea flavour.
Peas
Form the body and main flavour of the soup once cooked and added back in.
Drippings
Fat that carries flavour into the stewpan at the start of cooking.
Loaf sugar
Adds a small amount of sweetness that balances the vegetable flavour.

The step that matters

Simmering the peas until tender. Cooking on low heat under a cover keeps the peas gently softened and green. Boiling hard or cooking too long dulls the colour and flavour, and under-cooked peas leave the soup starchy and grainy.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peas, sugar):

  1. Mintfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Gingerfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, sugar. 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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