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Peas Soup Without Meat

A hearty pea soup made with peas, vegetables, and butter, served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Peas Soup Without Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. Combine peas and cold water in a large pot.

  2. Boil until peas are tender.

  3. Melt butter in a skillet and gently fry onions, carrots, and turnips until browned.

  4. Add fried vegetables to the pot with peas.

  5. Stir in black pepper and coarse sea salt.

  6. Simmer, stirring often, until vegetables are tender enough to pass through a sieve.

  7. Rub mixture through a sieve into a clean pot.

Finish and serve

  1. Bring to a boil.

  2. Add sliced celery and adjust seasoning if needed.

  3. Cook for an additional 20 minutes.

  4. Serve hot with fried or toasted bread on the side.

  5. Optionally add chili vinegar for flavor.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 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

Peas
Break down when simmered and sieved to give the soup its body and thick texture.
Onions
Browning in butter builds sweet, savoury depth in the base.
Butter
Fat for frying the vegetables, carrying flavour and aiding browning.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and colour as they soften and brown.
Turnips
Soften during simmering and add body and mild earthy flavour to the puree.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture through a sieve. Sieving breaks down the softened peas and vegetable fibres into a smooth, thick purée. If the vegetables are not fully tender, they will not pass through and the soup will be grainy.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, carrot, turnip, butter, pepper, celery, vinegar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, carrot, turnip, butter, pepper, celery, vinegar. 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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