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Peas a LA Creme

A creamy pea dish made with peas, cream, stock, butter, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Peas a LA Creme

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peas

  1. Shell the peas.

  2. Add the peas to a pan of boiling water with 1 teaspoon salt, ½ teaspoon sugar, and a pinch of baking soda per quart.

  3. Boil until tender, about 15 to 20 minutes, then drain.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the flour and butter over gentle heat until the butter is melted.

  2. Add the stock, cream, pepper, salt, and lemon juice; boil for 3 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the peas, reheat, and serve immediately.

  2. Optionally, sprinkle finely minced fresh mint on top.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Peas + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,005 recipes

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

  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

Peas
The main vegetable, cooked until tender and then coated in the sauce.
Butter
Melted with flour to form a roux that gives the sauce body and richness.
Flour
Thickens the butter and cream sauce so it clings to the peas.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture to the sauce.
White stock
Adds savoury depth to the sauce and thins it with the cream.

The step that matters

Make the sauce. Cooking the flour and butter gently before adding liquid cooks out raw flour taste and helps prevent lumps. Boiling the finished sauce then lets the flour fully thicken it.

Swap the peas

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

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

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