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Soup

Green Pea Soup

A soup made from peas, spinach, parsley, mint, and stock, seasoned with sugar, pepper, and salt.

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

Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Green Pea Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Bring the stock to a boil.

  2. Shell and wash the peas and pods carefully.

Cook

  1. Add the peas, spinach, parsley, mint, sugar, and a small basin of pea-pods to the stock.

  2. Boil for 1 hour.

Strain and serve

  1. Strain the mixture, rubbing it through a sieve.

  2. Season with pepper and salt, then serve.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Peas + minttop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,137 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + spinachtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

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

  4. Spinach + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Parsley + minttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,198 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Peas
Form the main body and sweet, vegetal flavour of the soup.
Second stock
Provides the liquid base that carries the flavour of the soup.
Spinach
Adds leafy flavour and a deeper green colour to the soup.
Sugar
Rounds out the flavour and balances the vegetal bitterness of the peas.

The step that matters

Boil for 1 hour. Boiling the peas long enough softens them fully so they can be pushed through a sieve smoothly. Under-cooked peas leave a grainy, starchy texture.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, mint, sugar, spinach, pepper):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Cashew nutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, mint, sugar, spinach, pepper. 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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