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Green Pease Soup

A soup made from boiled old and young green peas, blended and seasoned with salt, pepper, and optional aromatics.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and 16,012 recipes mention both. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Green Pease Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peas

  1. Shell the peas, separating the young from the old.

  2. Boil the old peas in water until tender, then reserve the liquid.

  3. Mash the boiled old peas and mix them with 2 quarts of the reserved liquid.

  4. Boil the young peas in water until soft.

Make the soup

  1. Combine the young peas and their water with the old pea mixture, stir, and boil for a few minutes.

  2. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve to achieve a smooth soup.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, celery, onions, spices, and herbs as 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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Celery + spinachtop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together616 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  3. Pepper + spinachtop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Peas + spinachtop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together550 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Old peas
Their starch and pulp thicken the soup and give it body when mashed.
Young peas
Add fresh, sweet pea flavour and a brighter green colour to the soup.
Reserved pea cooking liquid
Carries pea flavour and starch, so the soup is thinned without losing taste.

The step that matters

Rubbing the mixture through a fine sieve. Cooked peas are fibrous and skins resist breaking down. Pressing them through a fine sieve removes the skins and fibres, which is what makes the soup smooth rather than grainy.

Flavor stand-ins for the celery

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

  1. Garlicbetter flavor fit
  2. Parsleybetter flavor fit
  3. Thymebetter flavor fit
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, pepper, onion, spinach, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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