Skip to main content
Main

Tol. Peas, French Fashion

A stew of green peas cooked with butter, parsley, green onions, flour, sugar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25,843 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Tol. Peas, French Fashion

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peas

  1. In an earthen pan, combine the peas, butter, and enough cold water to cover them.

  2. Gently mix the peas with the butter until they stick together, then drain and transfer them to a colander.

Stew and thicken

  1. Stew the peas over moderate heat with parsley and green onions until they regain their green color.

  2. Sprinkle a little flour over the peas and stir before adding boiling water to cover them completely.

  3. Cook on high heat until no moisture remains, then add a sugar lump dissolved in water and a small amount of salt.

  4. Knead the remaining butter with a spoonful of flour and add it to the boiling peas to thicken them.

  5. Serve immediately without any sauce.

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. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Peas + parsleytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,885 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Peas + oniontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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
Form the main body of the stew, providing bulk and the dish's core texture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping the peas coat and hold together.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid as it gelatinises with heat, giving the stew body.
Parsley
Adds fresh, herbal aroma and flavour to the stewed peas.

The step that matters

Cook on high heat until no moisture remains. Reducing the free liquid concentrates the flavour and keeps the peas from becoming watery, so the later flour-thickened butter sits in a thick, not thin, stew.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, parsley, onion, flour, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, onion, flour, 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.

You might also like

Green PeasGreen Peas229 recipesGreen Peas SoupGreen Peas Soup35 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes