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Winter Peas Soup

A hearty soup of split peas, ham or bacon, carrots, turnips, onion, and spices, served over fried bread and garnished with mint.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Winter Peas Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the soup

  1. Place the sliced ham or bacon at the bottom of a soup pot.

  2. Add the split peas, chopped carrots, turnips, onion, pepper, salt, and water.

  3. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and let it simmer for 4 hours.

  4. Strain the soup and pour it into a tureen.

Serve

  1. Serve over fried bread.

  2. Sprinkle with pounded mint.

  3. Add chopped celery if desired.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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 during simmering to thicken the soup and give it body.
Ham or bacon
Adds savory, smoky flavor that seasons the broth as it simmers.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and color to the soup.
Onion
Builds aromatic flavor base as it softens in the broth.

The step that matters

Simmering the soup for 4 hours. A gentle simmer lets the split peas fully soften and release their starch, thickening the soup. Boiling hard can break up the peas unevenly and cloud the broth, while stopping early leaves the peas grainy.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, peas, carrot, turnip, onion, pepper, bread):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, peas, carrot, turnip, onion, pepper, bread. 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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