Name: Pea Soup
Ingredients: 2 cups peas; fried bread; coarse sea salt; pepper

Why it works: Peas and bread work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 804 recipes. Both carry hexyl acetate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

Pea Soup

Ingredients

2 cups peas
fried bread
coarse sea salt
pepper

Directions

Prepare peas by cooking them until tender.
In a tureen, place fried bread instead of rice.
Add the cooked peas to the tureen.
Season with coarse sea salt and pepper to taste.

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.

Peas + breadtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together804 recipes

Shared aroma: hexyl acetate (fruity, apple).
Peas + peppertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,331 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,964 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Peas: Form the main body of the soup, giving it bulk, body and a sweet, earthy flavour.
Fried bread: Acts as the starchy base in place of rice, softening as it soaks up the soup and adding body.