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Split Peas Soup

A hearty soup made from split peas, roast beef bones, carrots, turnips, and water, served with fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Split Peas Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Break the bones of roast beef and place them in a pan with 1 gallon of water.

  2. Add enough split peas to thicken the soup, along with 2 mashed carrots and 2 mashed turnips.

  3. Boil for 2 hours, stirring often to prevent burning.

  4. Once the peas are soft, pass the soup through a sieve.

  5. Season with coarse sea salt and add 1 pint of water.

  6. Boil the soup again and serve with fried bread.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Peas + carrottop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,994 recipes

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

  3. Peas + turniptop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,350 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Beef + carrottop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,606 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: hexyl acetate (fruity, apple).

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

What each ingredient does

Split peas
Break down during long boiling to thicken the soup and give it body.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the soup as they soften during boiling.
Turnips
Soften during boiling and add body and mild sweetness to the soup.
Roast beef bones
Release flavour and gelatin into the water during long simmering.

The step that matters

Stirring during the 2-hour boil. Split peas are dense and settle on the pan base, where they can scorch. Frequent stirring keeps them moving and prevents burning, which would give the soup a bitter, acrid taste.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, turnip, bread):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, 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.

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