Name: To Keep Green Peas Till Christmas
Ingredients: fresh green peas; coarse sea salt; mutton fat; water; sugar; butter

Why it works: Peas and mutton work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 598 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

To Keep Green Peas Till Christmas

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Choose very fine, young, and fresh green peas.
Shell the peas and boil them in salted water for 5-6 minutes.
Drain the peas in a colander.
Spread the peas on a cloth to dry them well.
Fill bottles with the dried peas and cover them with fried mutton fat.
Cork the bottles tightly and tie a bladder over them.
Store the bottles in a cool place.
When ready to use, boil water with a little salt, sugar, and a piece of butter.
Add the peas to the boiling water until heated through, then drain in a sieve.
In a saucepan, melt a good piece of butter with the peas, shaking until combined, 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.

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.

Peas + muttontop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together598 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Mutton + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,781 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Peas + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,887 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Peas + sugartop 31% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,928 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).