Skip to main content
Main

Old Peas Soup

A hearty soup of peas, vegetables, and fried bread, simmered in meat stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turnip and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Old Peas Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Save the water from boiled pork or beef.

  2. If using salt, add fresh water to it, or use fresh water entirely.

  3. Simmer the water with roast beef bones, a ham bone, or 1-2 anchovies and some good whole or split peas.

Make the soup

  1. Simmer until the peas can be pushed through a colander.

  2. Set the pea pulp aside and add more of the cooking liquid along with the chopped carrots, turnip, leek, and celery.

  3. Stew until all vegetables are tender, about 1 hour.

Serve

  1. In a serving bowl, combine fried bread, dried mint, pepper, and salt if desired.

  2. Pour the soup over the mixture in the bowl.

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. Turnip + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pork + beeftop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  5. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Peas
Break down into a thick pulp that gives the soup its body.
Carrots
Add gentle sweetness and soft texture as they stew until tender.
Leek
Contributes a mild, savoury onion-like aroma to the broth.
Fried bread
Adds crisp texture and soaks up some broth when the soup is poured over it.

The step that matters

Simmer the peas until they can be pushed through a colander. Peas must be fully softened before straining, because underdone peas stay grainy and will not pass smoothly, leaving a lumpy, uneven pulp.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, meat, beef, carrot, turnip, leek, celery):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, meat, beef, carrot, turnip, leek, celery. 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 pea soup recipes

Green 380Split 228Baked Split 20Creamed 13Dried 10Winter 9 See all 368 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesGreen PeasGreen Peas229 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipes