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Green Peas, with Cream

A creamy sauce with green peas, chives, butter, flour, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan and mix in the flour until well combined.

  2. Add the shelled peas, chives, salt, and pepper. Cook for 20 minutes in their own juice.

  3. Remove from heat and pour the gravy into another vessel.

  4. Stir the cream and powdered sugar into the gravy.

Finish and serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the peas and heat gently for 2 minutes without boiling before serving.

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. Flour + chivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,168 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Peas + chivetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together227 recipes

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

  5. Chive + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,885 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and flavor, and helps form the base roux.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by binding with the butter and absorbing liquid.
Shelled peas
Provide the main body and sweet, vegetal flavor of the dish.
Cream
Adds richness and smoothness, mellowing the sauce's texture.

The step that matters

Heating the sauce without boiling. Once the cream is added, boiling can cause it to separate or turn grainy, and flour-thickened sauces can thin out or break. Gentle heat keeps the sauce smooth and cohesive.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Cashew nutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, chive, pepper, 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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