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Pea Soup with Cucumbers and Lettuce

A light pea soup flavored with cucumbers, lettuce, onions, parsley, mint, butter, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Pea Soup with Cucumbers and Lettuce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the vegetables

  1. Combine cucumbers, lettuce, onions, parsley, and mint in a pot.

  2. Stir over gentle heat for 50 to 60 minutes.

Finish the soup

  1. Add salt and a good seasoning of white pepper or cayenne.

  2. Drain the mixture from the butter and add it to the strained stock.

  3. Bring to a gentle boil until the butter rises to the surface and is cleared.

  4. Add the young peas and serve the soup 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. Cucumber + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

  2. Peas + minttop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

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

  4. Cucumber + minttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together884 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Peas + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,293 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Young peas
Add sweet flavour and body to the soup.
Cucumbers
Contribute fresh, mild flavour and moisture to the soup.
Lettuce
Softens as it stews, adding body and a gentle sweetness to the stock.
Onions
Slow stewing brings out their sweetness and aroma in the stock.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, rounding out the flavour of the soup.

The step that matters

Bringing the butter to a gentle boil. A gentle boil lets the butter rise to the surface so it can be cleared off. A hard boil would mix the butter back into the liquid, leaving the soup greasy and cloudy.

Swap the mint

The recipe marks mint as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peas, cucumber, lettuce, onion, parsley, butter, white pepper):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, cucumber, lettuce, onion, parsley, butter, white pepper. 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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