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Pork, Boiled, and Pease Pudding

A boiled pork and split pea dish seasoned with vegetables and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 590 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pork, Boiled, and Pease Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the split peas in water for 12 hours.

  2. Place the pork in a large pot, cover with warm water (or cold if very salty), and bring to a boil.

  3. Skim the surface and boil for 10 minutes.

  4. Add the onion, carrot, turnip, celery, and peppercorns, all cut into thick slices.

  5. Simmer gently until the pork is cooked through.

Make the pease pudding

  1. Drain the soaked peas.

  2. Tie the peas in a cloth.

  3. Cook the peas in the boiling pot with the pork for about 1 hour.

  4. Rub the cooked peas through a fine sieve.

  5. Mix the sieved peas with butter and egg yolks. Season the mixture with salt and pepper.

  6. Return the mixture to the cloth.

  7. Boil the mixture with the pork for an additional 40 minutes.

Serve

  1. Boil the parsnips and cabbage separately.

  2. Cut the parsnips lengthwise into four pieces and season the cabbage with pepper, cutting it into small squares.

  3. Serve the pork on a hot dish, garnished with the parsnips and cabbage.

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. Parsnip + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 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 bulk of the pudding, thickening into a smooth, spoonable purée when cooked and sieved.
Egg yolks
Bind the puréed peas and set with heat, giving the pudding a richer, firmer body.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, silkier mouthfeel to the pudding.
Pork
Flavours the cooking liquid that the peas and vegetables simmer in.

The step that matters

Rub the cooked peas through a fine sieve. Peas must be fully softened before sieving; undercooked peas stay grainy and won't form a smooth purée. Pressing them through a fine sieve removes skins and fibres, which gives the pudding its even texture.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, cabbage, parsnip, onion, carrot, turnip, celery):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, cabbage, parsnip, onion, carrot, turnip, celery. 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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