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Green Pea Soup

A hearty soup made with hulled peas, veal, onion, butter, and flour, served over diced fried toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Green Pea Soup

Why it works: Pepper and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Green Pea Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Combine water, veal, onion, salt, and pepper in a saucepan. Bring to a boil and skim.

  2. Add the peas and boil steadily for 2 hours.

  3. Strain the mixture through a colander, then through a sieve, pressing while straining.

  4. Return the strained soup to the saucepan.

Thicken and serve

  1. When it boils, add butter mixed with flour and let it boil for 5 more minutes.

  2. Serve the soup over fried toast cut into dice.

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. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Peas + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,331 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

Hulled peas
Provide the main body and flavour of the soup as they break down during boiling.
Flour
Thickens the soup when cooked with butter, giving it a fuller body.
Butter
Adds richness and smooth mouthfeel to the soup and carries the flour into it.
Veal knuckle
Enriches the broth with savoury gelatin and meaty flavour during long simmering.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour mixture. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps. Mixing it with butter first coats the particles so they disperse smoothly, and boiling for several minutes cooks out the raw starch taste and fully thickens the soup.

Swap the peas

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, pepper, onion, butter, 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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