Green Pea Soup
Boil three pints shelled pease in three quarts of water; when quite soft, mash through a colander, adding a little water to free the pulp from the skins; return pulp to the water in which it was boiled, add a head of lettuce chopped, and half a pint young pease; boil half an hour, season with salt and pepper, and thicken with two tablespoons butter rubbed into a little flour. Serve with bits of toasted bread. The soup, when done, should be as thick as cream. omit the lettuce. .
A straightforward fresh-pea pottage from the era before blenders, when a colander and a wooden spoon did the pureeing. The odd trailing fragment — "omit the lettuce" — is almost certainly the tail of a variant note that lost its opening clause in typesetting; treat the lettuce as optional.
- Quantities in modern termsThree pints of shelled peas is 6 cups, roughly 2 lb shelled, which means something like 5 to 6 lb of peas in the pod. Three quarts of water is 12 cups; the half pint of young peas added later is 1 cup.
- Frozen peas workFrozen green peas are picked and blanched at their sugar peak and are a legitimate substitute here, both for the pulp and for the whole peas stirred in at the end. Shelled fresh peas from a market are often starchy and will taste flatter than frozen.
- The hinge: get the pulp, not the skinsThe whole character of the soup depends on pushing the cooked peas through and leaving the hulls behind. A food mill or a blender followed by a medium sieve does in two minutes what the colander does slowly, and gives the cream-thick body the recipe asks for.
- Cut the second boilHalf an hour of boiling after the young peas go in will turn them grey and dull the flavour. Five to seven minutes is enough for young peas, two to three for frozen; add them once the puree is hot and hold it just below a simmer.
- Water, not stockThe original uses only the pea cooking water, which is thinner than many modern soup recipes. A light chicken or vegetable stock in place of part of the water is closer to modern taste without changing the dish.
- ThickeningTwo tablespoons butter rubbed into flour is a beurre manie: the paste rubbed cold, then whisked into the hot soup. Let it cook three or four minutes at a simmer so the flour loses its raw taste; use about the same weight of flour as butter.
- Consistency and yield"As thick as cream" means pouring cream, not whipped. Expect around 2 1/2 quarts finished, serving eight, and thin with hot water if it tightens as it stands.
- The toast"Bits of toasted bread" can be treated as croutons: bread cut small, dried and browned in a moderate oven (around 350F) or fried in butter. Add them at the table so they stay crisp.
Green pea soup of this kind sits at the older end of the English and American soup tradition, where a "pottage of pease" was thickened by the vegetable itself rather than by cream or stock, and where lettuce was a soup green as often as a salad one orming into broths well into the nineteenth century. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled from Ohio housewives' contributions and first published in 1877, was written for kitchens with a summer garden attached, which is why the recipe assumes peas in quantity and distinguishes between the mature peas that get mashed and the "young pease" saved whole for texture. Dried split peas made the winter version of the same soup; this is the June one, and the short season for tender garden peas is the reason such recipes were once seasonal events rather than pantry standbys.