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Puree of Green Peas

A creamy puree made from boiled peas, lettuce hearts, green onions, mint, spinach, and butter, served with fried croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 427 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Puree of Green Peas

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the vegetables

  1. Boil the peas, lettuce hearts, green onions, mint leaves, and spinach in 2 quarts of water for 1 hour.

  2. Strain the mixture and pound it in a mortar.

Purée and thin

  1. Pass the mixture through a wire sieve and then a fine sieve.

  2. Add enough broth from boiling to achieve a cream-like consistency.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the butter and season with pepper and additional salt if needed.

  2. Simmer briefly and serve with fried croutons.

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. Lettuce + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together427 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

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

  3. Peas + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,293 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Spinach + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Peas + spinachtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together550 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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, green flavour of the purée.
Lettuce hearts
Add soft, mild vegetable bulk that helps the purée become smooth when sieved.
Butter
Adds fat that gives the purée a silky, rich mouthfeel and a rounder flavour.
Sugar
Adds gentle sweetness that balances the vegetables' natural bitterness.

The step that matters

Stirring in the butter. Butter is a fat-in-water emulsion that can separate if the purée is overheated or boiled hard. Adding it gently and keeping the heat low lets it blend into a glossy, smooth texture instead of greasy droplets.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peas, lettuce, mint, spinach, sugar, butter, pepper):

  1. Cucumberfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, lettuce, mint, spinach, sugar, butter, pepper. 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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