Skip to main content
Main

French. Split Pea Soup

A hearty soup of green split peas, ham, and butter, served with fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

French. Split Pea Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the soup

  1. Pick and rinse the split peas.

  2. In a stock pot, combine peas, salt, butter, and enough cold water to cover.

  3. Add ham and simmer for nearly 2 hours.

  4. Remove the ham and pass the soup through a tammy.

  5. Add broth to achieve desired consistency and boil for 1 hour.

Finish and serve

  1. To clarify, stir in sugar and butter after removing from heat.

  2. In a tureen, add spinach for color before serving.

  3. Serve with small diced bread fried in butter.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Peas + spinachtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together550 recipes

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

  4. Peas + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together804 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexyl acetate (fruity, apple).

  5. Spinach + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Green split peas
Break down during long simmering to thicken the soup and give it body.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the finished soup.
Broth
Adjusts the liquid level and consistency, thinning or loosening the soup.
Sugar
Adds a small amount of sweetness to balance the savoury flavour.

The step that matters

Pass the soup through a tammy. Pressing the cooked peas through a fine sieve breaks them into a smooth purée. Skipping or rushing this leaves the soup grainy and uneven in texture.

Swap the spinach

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, butter, ham, sugar, bread. 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.

More split pea soup recipes

Baked 20Yellow 4 See all 228 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesGreen PeasGreen Peas229 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes