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Potage Aux Petits Pois

A French soup of veal, onions, peas, bacon, herbs, and stock, thickened with mashed peas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Potage Aux Petits Pois

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Layer the sliced onion and veal in a pot, then add the herbs and stock.

  2. Stew gently until the mixture is a good color.

Prepare the peas

  1. Fry the bacon with parsley in a separate pan until crispy.

  2. Add the green peas to the bacon.

  3. Stir and stew until the peas are tender.

  4. Pound the peas in a mortar.

Finish the soup

  1. Add the mashed peas to the veal soup.

  2. Continue to stew until the soup thickens.

  3. Remove the veal.

  4. Serve the veal with another sauce if desired.

  5. Pass the soup through a fine sieve.

  6. Serve the soup hot.

  7. Check that the soup is as thick as cream; add a pinch of powdered sugar and season to taste.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Thyme + peastop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together575 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Parsley + peastop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,885 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Green peas
Provide the main body and flavor, and thicken the soup when mashed and stewed.
Veal
Flavors the stock as it stews gently, giving the soup its savory base.
Bacon
Adds smoky, salty fat that carries flavor into the soup.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the soup that the other ingredients cook in.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and depth as it softens in the pot.

The step that matters

Thickening the soup with mashed peas. Peas must be fully tender before mashing, and the soup must simmer long enough for the starch to thicken it. Undercooked peas stay grainy and the soup stays thin.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, veal, thyme, parsley, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, veal, thyme, parsley, sugar. 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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