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Soup

Green Pea Soup

A soup made with cucumbers, lettuces, onions, parsley, mint, butter, young peas, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Green Pea Soup

Why it works: Cucumber and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Green Pea Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Combine cucumbers, lettuces, onions, parsley, and mint in a pot.

  2. Stir over gentle heat for about 1 hour.

  3. Add salt and white pepper or cayenne to taste.

  4. Drain the mixture from the butter and add it to the strained stock.

Finish and serve

  1. Bring to a gentle boil until the butter rises to the surface and is completely cleared.

  2. Add ½ to ¾ pint of boiled young peas and serve immediately.

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. Cucumber + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

  2. Mint + peastop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

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

  4. Cucumber + minttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together884 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Lettuce + peastop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,293 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers
Give the soup its fresh, watery body and light vegetable flavour.
Lettuces
Add soft vegetable bulk and moisture that mellows into the stock as it cooks.
Young peas
Add sweetness, a green colour and a fuller, more substantial body.
Onions
Provide a savoury aromatic base that deepens the flavour of the stock.
Butter
Adds fat and a rich mouthfeel, carrying flavour through the soup.

The step that matters

Boil gently until the butter clears. Butter is fat that separates from the liquid when heated. A gentle boil lets the fat rise cleanly to the surface so it can be skimmed off, while a hard boil would keep it mixed in and leave the soup greasy and cloudy.

Swap the mint

The recipe marks mint as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, lettuce, onion, parsley, white pepper, butter, peas):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, lettuce, onion, parsley, white pepper, butter, peas. 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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