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Green Pease Soup

A vegetable soup of green peas, broth, carrots, onions, lettuces, parsley, and optional fried cucumber slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Green Pease Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

  1. Shell the peas and wash the shells.

  2. Boil the shells in the broth for 30 minutes, then strain them out.

  3. Bring the broth back to a boil and add the peas, salt, carrots, onions, lettuces, and parsley.

  4. Boil for 30 minutes, then serve.

Thicken and finish

  1. For thickened soup, boil the old peas until they can be mashed through a colander.

  2. Stir the pea pulp into the broth and simmer for 1 hour.

  3. Add the bread crumbs and boil for a few minutes.

  4. Boil the young peas separately and stir them into the soup before serving.

  5. Season with salt and sugar, and add butter to the tureen before pouring in the soup.

  6. Optionally, add fried cucumber slices just before serving.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

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

  3. Peas + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,293 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Carrot + lettucetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together976 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Green peas
Provide the main body and flavour, and thicken the soup when mashed into pulp.
Bread crumbs
Thicken the broth as they cook, giving the soup a fuller body.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the soup.
Broth
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour of the whole soup.
Lettuces
Add a soft, mild vegetable flavour and body as they cook down.

The step that matters

Boil the old peas until they can be mashed through a colander. Cooking the peas until fully tender lets the starch and pulp break down, so the purée passes smoothly through a colander and thickens the soup evenly instead of leaving lumps.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peas, carrot, lettuce, parsley, veal, tea, bread):

  1. Turnipfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, carrot, lettuce, parsley, veal, tea, bread. 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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