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Peas with Bacon

A simple dish of boiled peas with bacon, butter, flour, mint, lettuce, and onion.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Peas and mint are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,137 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Peas with Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the pods of the peas.

Cook

  1. Boil the peas in 1 quart of water with the mint, lettuce, salt, and onion for 20 minutes.

  2. Add the bacon and butter, and cook until the bacon is crispy.

  3. Stir in the flour to thicken the mixture.

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

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

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

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

  3. Lettuce + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,562 recipes

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

  4. Mint + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together569 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Lettuce + flourtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,236 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Peas
Form the body of the dish and provide the main sweet, vegetal flavour.
Streaky bacon
Adds savoury, salty fat and browned flavour to the peas.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour through the dish.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid so the peas become a coating sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour. Flour needs to be cooked in the hot liquid to thicken evenly; adding it to a still-boiling mixture without stirring can form lumps, and under-cooking leaves a raw floury taste.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peas, lettuce, onion, butter, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, lettuce, onion, butter, flour. 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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