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Split Pea Soup

A simple soup made from soaked split peas, water, and optional meat, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Peas and meat work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 573 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Split Pea Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the soaked split peas in 1 quart of water.

  2. Add water as it boils away to maintain the same quantity.

  3. Add any meat to season the soup.

  4. When ready to serve, strain the soup and season to taste.

  5. Stir in 1 tablespoon of flour 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. Peas + meattop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together573 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  2. Peas + flourtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,837 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Meat + flourtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,529 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Split peas
Form the main body of the soup, thickening it as they break down during boiling.
Flour
Thickens the soup slightly as it is stirred in before serving.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, flour. 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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