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To Keep Green Peas Till Christmas

This recipe preserves green peas for Christmas by boiling, drying, and sealing them in mutton suet.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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

Blanch and dry

  1. Shell the peas and throw them into boiling water with salt.

  2. Let them simmer for 5-6 minutes.

  3. Drain the peas.

  4. Spread the peas on a cloth to dry well.

Preserve

  1. Fill bottles with the dried peas.

  2. Cover the peas with mutton suet.

  3. Cork the bottles.

  4. Tie a bladder and a lath over the bottles.

  5. Store the bottles in a cool, dry place.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil water with salt, sugar, and butter.

  2. Add the peas to the boiling water.

  3. Drain the peas in a sieve.

  4. Transfer the peas to a saucepan with a piece of butter.

  5. Serve hot.

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. Peas + muttontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together598 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Butter + muttontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Peas + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,887 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Peas + sugartop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh green peas
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender when simmered and cooked.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the peas when they are cooked in the sweetened water.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, fatty mouthfeel to the cooked peas.
Mutton suet
Covers the peas to keep air away from them during storage.

The step that matters

Drying the peas well before bottling. Any water left on the peas can encourage spoilage in storage. Spreading them on a cloth and drying thoroughly before filling the bottles and covering them with suet helps keep the peas preserved.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Lima beansfits about as well
  3. Peasthe original
  4. Walnutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, mutton. 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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