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Pease Soup

A hearty soup made with peas, broth, vegetables, and herbs, served with toasted or fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Pease Soup

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Pease Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

  1. If the broth is too salty, dilute it with water.

  2. Bring the broth to a boil and add the split or whole peas.

  3. Boil for 2 to 3 hours.

  4. If using pea flour, mix it with a little cold broth and stir into the boiling broth for 30 minutes.

Add vegetables and herbs

  1. Add the chopped celery, onion, carrot, and turnip to the boiling broth and cook for about 1 hour.

  2. Add the chopped parsley and mint for the last 20 minutes of cooking.

  3. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve with small squares of toasted or fried bread and sprinkle with dried mint.

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.

  1. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Split peas
Break down during long boiling to thicken the soup and give it body.
Broth
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour of the whole soup.
Onion
Builds savoury depth as it softens into the broth.
Carrot
Adds gentle sweetness and colour to the soup.
Turnip
Contributes earthy flavour and body as it cooks down.

The step that matters

Adding the pea flour. Pea flour dissolves easily if it is first mixed with cold broth, because stirring dry flour into boiling liquid forms lumps that are hard to smooth out.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, peas, celery, onion, carrot, turnip, parsley):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, peas, celery, onion, carrot, turnip, parsley. 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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