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Creamed Peas in Timbals

A creamy pea dish cooked with butter, sugar, and flour, served in timbals.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Creamed Peas in Timbals

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Gather young tender peas, hull them, wash them in cold water, and drain well.

Cook and serve

  1. Season with salt and sugar, then add butter and cook for 20 minutes.

  2. Blend flour with sweet cream, then pour into the boiling peas.

  3. Let simmer for a few minutes and serve in timbals.

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

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

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Peas + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,887 recipes

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

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

Young tender peas
Form the bulk of the dish and provide its main body and sweet, vegetal flavor.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Sweet cream
Supplies fat and moisture, creating the creamy sauce around the peas.
All-purpose flour
Starch thickens the cream as it heats, giving the sauce body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the savory seasoning and enhances the peas' flavor.

The step that matters

Blending the flour into the cream before adding it to the peas. Flour mixed directly into hot liquid clumps. Blending it smoothly into cold cream first lets the starch disperse evenly, and a brief simmer then gelatinizes it into a uniform, thickened sauce.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, cream, flour):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, cream, 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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