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Excellent Peas Soup

A hearty soup made with cucumbers, cabbage hearts, green peas, split peas, onions, 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 ↓

Excellent Peas Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. In a stewpan, combine cucumbers, cabbage hearts, butter, green peas, and onion over low heat.

  2. Cover and let it stew for 2 hours.

Make the pea base

  1. In the meantime, boil split peas in water for about 1 hour.

  2. Pulp the split peas through a sieve into their cooking liquid.

Combine and finish

  1. Add the pulped peas to the stewpan mixture and boil together for 15 minutes, seasoning with pepper and salt.

  2. If the soup is not thick enough, add a mixture of flour and butter to thicken.

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. Cabbage + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together622 recipes

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

  3. Lettuce + peastop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,293 recipes

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

  4. Cucumber + peastop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together629 recipes

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

  5. Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

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 pulped to give the soup body and a thick, smooth texture.
Cucumbers
Provide the main vegetable bulk and fresh, mild flavour as they soften during stewing.
Cabbage hearts
Add soft, sweet vegetable body that softens into the stewed base.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour while the vegetables stew.
Flour
Thickens the soup when mixed with butter and added if the soup is too thin.

The step that matters

Pulping the split peas. Pushing the cooked peas through a sieve, rather than just draining them, is what turns them into a smooth, thickened body for the soup. Leaving lumps or skipping this step gives a thin, grainy result.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, cabbage, lettuce, butter, onion, pepper, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, cabbage, lettuce, butter, onion, pepper, flour. 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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