Skip to main content
Main

To Stew Peas, Windsor Beans, or French Beans

A creamy stew of peas or beans cooked with butter, flour, cream, and optional egg yolks, lemon juice, herbs, and onion.

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

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Stew Peas, Windsor Beans, or French Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peas

  1. Boil the peas or beans in water until tender, then drain.

Make the sauce

  1. In a stew-pan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook for 3-4 minutes without browning.

  3. Gradually add the cream and a little sugar, stirring until the sauce boils.

  4. Add minced herbs, onion, and mint while cooking.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the peas or beans and heat until very hot.

  2. Stir in beaten egg yolks and lemon juice before serving.

  3. Serve immediately.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Peas + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,005 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the butter and cream into a smooth sauce that coats the peas.
Cream
Forms the body of the sauce and gives it a rich, smooth texture.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour and forms the base for the flour roux.
Egg yolks
Enrich and further thicken the sauce when stirred in before serving.
Peas
Provide the main vegetable body and sweet, tender texture of the dish.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken by setting when heated. If the sauce is too hot when they go in, they can scramble and turn grainy, so add them off the heat or with the sauce only just warm.

“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

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesGreen PeasGreen Peas229 recipesGreen Peas SoupGreen Peas Soup35 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes