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Canned Pea Soup

A soup made from canned peas, onion, celery, and butter, thickened with flour and milk, served with fried bread dice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Peas and mint are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,137 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Canned Pea Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peas

  1. Drain the peas and soak them in cold salt water for 30 minutes.

  2. Boil the peas in hot salted water with onion and celery until soft.

Make the soup

  1. Rub the cooked peas through a colander with the cooking water.

  2. Return the mixture to the heat and bring to a boil.

  3. Mix butter and flour, then add to the soup along with hot milk and sugar.

  4. Simmer for 5 minutes, then serve in a tureen with fried bread-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.

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

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Celery + minttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together334 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

American peas
Form the main body of the soup and give it its pea flavour and thick texture when mashed.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and with the flour forms a thickening base for the soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks with the butter, giving it body.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softens the flavour of the soup.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour mixture. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps; mixing it with butter first coats the starch granules so they disperse evenly and thicken smoothly.

Swap the mint

The recipe marks mint as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peas, onion, celery, butter, flour, milk, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, onion, celery, butter, flour, milk, 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.

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