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Green Peas with Cream

A simple dish of boiled green peas served in a butter, flour, and cream sauce with sugar and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Green Peas with Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peas

  1. Boil the peas in salted water until tender, about 18 to 25 minutes, then drain well.

Make the sauce

  1. In a clean saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook for 3 to 5 minutes without browning.

  3. Gradually add the cream, stirring until the sauce boils.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the sugar and the drained peas, tossing gently until heated through.

  2. Serve immediately.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Young peas
Provide the main body and sweet, fresh flavour of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and gives the sauce a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the cream into a smooth sauce as it cooks with the butter.
Cream
Forms the body of the sauce, adding richness and a silky, coating texture.
Sugar
Adds a small amount of sweetness that balances the savoury cream and enhances the peas' flavour.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the butter. Flour must cook gently in the butter without browning so it loses its raw taste and thickens properly. Browning changes the colour and flavour, and undercooked flour leaves a pasty taste.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, cream, sugar. 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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