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Another Old Peas Soup

A hearty soup of split peas, ham or bacon, mutton or salt beef, carrots, celery, onions, and dried mint.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Another Old Peas Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a large pot, boil 4 quarts of water with the ham or bacon, mutton or salt beef, and split peas until the peas are soft.

  2. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve and mash the peas with the back of a spoon until smooth.

  3. Return the soup to the pot and simmer gently for 1 hour before serving.

Serve

  1. Toast slices of bread, cut into dice, and fry in butter.

  2. Serve the fried bread in the soup or on the side, with dried mint in a small dish.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Split peas
Break down when simmered to thicken the soup and give it body.
Ham or bacon
Adds savoury, salty flavour to the cooking water.
Mutton or salt beef
Adds meaty flavour and richness to the broth.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, mutton, pepper, carrot, celery, onion, butter):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Peasthe original
  3. Lentilsfits about as well
  4. Lima beansfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, mutton, pepper, carrot, celery, onion, butter. 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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