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Cream of Pea Soup
2 cups Marrowfat peas (or one can). 1½ tablespoons butter. 2 tablespoons flour. 1/2 cup hot cream. 1 teaspoon salt. 1/8 teaspoon pepper. 2 teaspoons sugar. 2 cups water. 1½ cups scalded milk. 1 slice onion.
PROCESS: Peas that are too hard to serve as a vegetable may be used for soup. Cover them with the cold water and cook until soft. Rub through sieve, reheat pulp and thicken with butter and flour cooked together. Scald milk with onion, remove onion, add milk slowly to pea mixture, stirring constantly. Add hot cream and seasoning. Serve with Crisp Saratoga Wafers.
A classic white-sauce vegetable purée from the era when peas came fresh in the pod and the tough late-season ones had to be put to some use. The ingredient list omits the peas themselves, so the quantity is yours to judge.
- The missing quantityNo amount of peas is given. For the 2 cups of water and 1½ cups milk here, 2 to 2½ cups of shelled peas (about 2 lb in the pod, or a 1 lb bag of frozen) gives a soup of the right body. Frozen peas are young and sweet and will cook in a few minutes rather than the long simmer the original assumes.
- Why the sugarThe two teaspoons of sugar may be standing in for the sugars that convert to starch as peas mature rather than sweetening for its own sake; the recipe does not say. With modern frozen peas, picked and blanched young, taste before adding it; you may want half or none.
- Scalded milkScalding means heating to just below the boil, around 180F, until it steams and forms a skin at the edge. It was originally done to kill enzymes and organisms in raw milk; today it serves only to infuse the onion and to keep the milk from chilling the roux.
- Rub through a sieveA food mill or a blender followed by a sieve does the same work in a fraction of the time. Sieving is not optional if you want the texture the recipe intends — pea skins do not break down and will make the soup gritty.
- Order of operationsCook the butter and flour together for a minute or two before adding liquid, then add the scalded milk slowly and off the heat at first. Adding it fast to a hot roux is how you get lumps.
- The cream at the endThe half cup of cream goes in warm and last, after the soup is off the boil. Boiling the soup once the cream is in risks it separating.
- Saratoga wafersSaratoga chips are potato chips — thin rounds of potato fried crisp, named for Saratoga Springs, New York. Good plain kettle chips are the honest modern substitute.
- YieldRoughly a quart, which serves four as a first course or two or three as a light lunch.
This comes from Elizabeth O. Hiller's 52 Sunday Dinners (1913), a menu book that laid out a full year of Sunday meals for the middle-class American household, and its logic is thrift as much as cookery. The opening line is the point: peas that had grown too starchy on the vine to serve as a vegetable could still be salvaged as soup. Cream soups of this kind — a vegetable purée let down with a thin béchamel — were a staple of the period's cooking-school curriculum, taught as a single technique with interchangeable vegetables, and they appear in Fannie Farmer and her contemporaries in near-identical form. The Saratoga chips served alongside were by 1913 a long-established American garnish, generally traced to the resort kitchens of Saratoga Springs in the mid-nineteenth century, and were sold commercially in tins well before this book was written.