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Green Peas Soup, Without Meat

A pea soup made from boiled peas, butter, and water, strained and simmered.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Green Peas Soup, Without Meat

Why it works: Peas and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,887 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Green Peas Soup, Without Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the peas

  1. Boil the peas in 3 quarts of water with salt and baking soda until tender.

  2. Drain the peas and pound them in a mortar.

Make the soup

  1. Gradually mix in 5 pints of the cooking liquid.

  2. Put the mixture back over the fire and simmer gently for 15 minutes.

  3. Press the soup through a fine sieve.

Prepare the butter

  1. In the meantime, simmer the butter in a separate pan.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Peas
Provide the main body of the soup, as their starch thickens and gives a smooth texture when pureed.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Baking soda
Raises the cooking water's alkalinity, helping the peas soften and break down more easily.

The step that matters

Gradually mix in the cooking liquid. Pounded peas form lumps if the liquid is added all at once. Adding it gradually lets the starch and pulp disperse evenly, giving a smoother soup before it is simmered and sieved.

“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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