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Green Peas

Green peas served with mint butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Green Peas

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 ↓

Green Peas

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the peas

  1. Tie the lettuce and onion into a small bunch.

  2. Boil the peas with the bunch in plenty of salted water and sugar.

  3. Once cooked, strain the water and remove the bunch.

Make the mint butter and serve

  1. Mix ½ cup of cold butter with finely minced blanched mint.

  2. Serve the mint butter on a dish and pour the peas over it.

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 + 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. Peas + oniontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,460 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
Form the main body of the dish and carry the buttery mint flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, fatty mouthfeel that carries the mint flavour.
Mint lettuce
Infuses the cooking water with a fresh, aromatic mint flavour.
Onion
Adds a mild aromatic background flavour to the cooking water.
Sugar
Adds gentle sweetness that balances the savoury salt and herb notes.

The step that matters

Mixing the mint into cold butter. Butter kept cold stays firm enough to blend with the minced mint without melting or separating. Blanching the mint first helps it keep a bright green colour in the finished butter.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Cucumberfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, butter, mint, lettuce, 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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