Skip to main content
Main

Green Peas Soup

A soup of young and old green peas, onions, spinach, and butter, thickened with rice flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Green Peas Soup

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 Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peas

  1. Shell the peas, separating the old from the young ones.

Make the soup

  1. In a stew pan, combine the old peas, butter, and a little water.

  2. Add old lettuce parts, sliced onions, pepper, and salt.

  3. Simmer until the peas can be pressed through a colander.

  4. Add more water, the cooking liquid, the best lettuce parts, young peas, spinach, pepper, and salt.

  5. Stew until all vegetables are tender.

  6. Just before serving, stir in chopped mint.

  7. If the soup is too thin, mix rice flour with butter and boil it in the soup for thickness.

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. Pepper + spinachtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

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

  4. Onion + spinachtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,336 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Spinach + ricetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together518 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

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

What each ingredient does

Young green peas
Provide the main body, sweetness and fresh flavour of the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour when the vegetables are cooked in it.
Onion
Builds savoury aroma and depth as it softens in the pan.
Rice flour
Thickens the soup when cooked with butter and boiled into the liquid.

The step that matters

Thickening with rice flour and butter. Flour must be cooked in fat before it meets the hot liquid, otherwise it clumps and stays raw-tasting. Boiling it fully lets the starch swell and thicken the soup smoothly.

Swap the mint

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

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, butter, onion, pepper, spinach, rice, 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.

You might also like

Green PeasGreen Peas229 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesSpinach SoupSpinach Soup50 recipesSteamed RiceSteamed Rice48 recipes