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Lentil and Dried Green Peas Soup

A hearty soup made with lentils, dried green peas, onions, celery, carrots, turnips, salt, and optional butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lentils and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 109 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lentil and Dried Green Peas Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peas

  1. Pick and wash the peas and lentils.

  2. Soak the peas in fresh water for 12 hours.

Cook

  1. Combine the peas and lentils in 4 quarts of water with salt.

  2. Boil for 2 hours, then add the other vegetables.

  3. Boil for an additional 2 hours.

  4. Rub the soup through a coarse sieve or fine colander, adding boiling water if needed.

  5. Return the soup to the pan and season with pepper and salt.

  6. If desired, add butter and mix potato flour with butter to thicken, boiling for a few minutes.

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. Lentils + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together109 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 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

Lentils
Break down during long simmering to give the soup body and a thick texture.
Dried green peas
Break down during long simmering and sieving to thicken the soup and give it body.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body as they soften during the long simmer.
Turnips
Soften during simmering and add body and mild sweetness to the purée.
Potato flour or wheat flour
Starch that thickens the soup further when boiled briefly with butter.

The step that matters

Rubbing the soup through a sieve. Pushing the cooked peas, lentils and vegetables through a sieve breaks them into a smooth purée. Too coarse a sieve leaves lumps, and adding boiling water keeps the soup from stiffening too much.

Swap the potato

The recipe marks potato as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lentils, peas, onion, celery, carrot, turnip, butter):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lentils, peas, onion, celery, carrot, turnip, butter. 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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