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Cream Soup

A creamy soup made from green peas, milk, butter, flour, and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Cream Soup

Why it works: Peas and mint are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,137 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Cream Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pea base

  1. Drain the can of green peas and cook them in 1 pint of cold water with the mint, salt, and sugar for 15 minutes until tender.

  2. Press the cooked peas through a sieve.

Make the soup

  1. In a basin, melt the butter, then add enough flour to make a roux and cook briefly.

  2. Stir in 1 quart of hot milk and mix well.

  3. Add the pressed peas to the milk mixture and cook until thoroughly blended.

  4. While boiling, stir in 1 cup of whipped cream.

  5. Add cooked green peas if 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.

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 + minttop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,137 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Green peas
Provide the main flavor and body of the soup once pressed through a sieve.
Butter
Melts with the flour to form a roux that thickens the soup.
Flour
Combined with butter to form a roux that thickens the milk.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base that the pressed peas are blended into.
Whipped cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture at the end.

The step that matters

Cooking the roux. Cooking the butter and flour briefly lets the starch cook out raw flour taste before the milk is added. Cooking it too little leaves a pasty flavor, and adding hot milk too fast can make lumps, so the roux should be smooth and cooked briefly before stirring in the milk.

Swap the peas

The recipe marks peas as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mint, sugar, butter, flour, milk, cream):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Cashew nutfits about as well
  4. Peasthe original

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