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To Boil Green Pease

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Peas and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,887 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Boil Green Pease

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Shell the peas and place them in a long pot.

  2. Set the pot in a larger pot of boiling water and cover it.

  3. Cook until the peas are tender.

  4. Transfer the peas to a serving dish and sprinkle with salt.

  5. Add a generous amount of butter and shake between two dishes to mix.

  6. Serve in a hot dish, adding a sprig of spearmint if desired.

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 + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,887 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Peas + spearminttop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2 recipes

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

  3. Butter + spearminttop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

Swap the spearmint

The recipe marks spearmint as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peas, butter):

  1. Mintfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Spearmintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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