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Peas Soup Without Meat

A hearty split pea soup cooked with onions, carrots, turnips, celery, and butter, served hot with diced fried or toasted bread.

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 ↓

Peas Soup Without Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peas

  1. Rinse the split peas and remove any worm-eaten ones.

  2. In a large pot, combine the peas and cold water, and boil until tender.

Fry the vegetables

  1. In a skillet, melt the butter and fry the onions, carrots, and turnips until browned.

Make the soup

  1. Add the fried vegetables to the pot with the peas, along with black pepper and salt.

  2. Stir frequently and cook until the vegetables are tender enough to pass through a sieve.

  3. Pass the mixture through a sieve into a clean pot and bring to a boil.

  4. Add the sliced celery and adjust seasoning if necessary.

  5. Cook for an additional 20 minutes and serve hot with diced fried or toasted 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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Split peas
Form the body of the soup, thickening into a smooth purée when cooked and sieved.
Onions
Add savoury sweetness and depth when browned in butter.
Carrots
Contribute sweetness and body to the soup once cooked down and sieved.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and body, helping the soup thicken when puréed.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the vegetables brown when fried.

The step that matters

Pass the mixture through a sieve. The vegetables must be fully tender before sieving; undercooked pieces will not pass through and leave a grainy, uneven texture in the soup.

Swap the peas

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, carrot, turnip, butter, pepper, celery, vinegar. 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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