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To Keep Green Peas Till Christmas

A method for preserving fresh green peas by drying and storing them in mutton fat for use at Christmas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Peas and mutton work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 598 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

To Keep Green Peas Till Christmas

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peas

  1. Choose very fine, young, and fresh green peas.

  2. Shell the peas and boil them in salted water for 5-6 minutes.

  3. Drain the peas in a colander.

  4. Spread the peas on a cloth to dry well.

Preserve

  1. Fill bottles with the dried peas and cover them with fried mutton fat.

  2. Cork the bottles tightly and tie a bladder over them.

  3. Store the bottles in a cool place.

Cook and serve

  1. To use, boil water with a little salt, sugar, and butter.

  2. Drain the peas and add them to a saucepan with butter, shaking until melted.

  3. Serve the peas in a dish.

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. Peas + muttontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together598 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Mutton + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,781 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Peas + sugartop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh green peas
The main ingredient, whose tender texture and sweetness the preserving method aims to keep.
Mutton fat
Seals the peas from air in the bottle, helping them keep during storage.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the peas when they are finished in the saucepan.

The step that matters

Drying the peas before bottling. Peas that are still wet when covered with fat can spoil in storage, because trapped moisture supports microbial growth. Drying them well on a cloth before filling the bottles helps the preserved peas keep.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, sugar, butter):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Lima beansfits about as well
  3. Peasthe original
  4. Walnutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, sugar, 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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