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Chantilly Soup
Boil one pint of young green peas, shelled, three spring onions, and a spring of mint, until the peas are quite tender. Remove the mint and the onions, press the peas through a sieve, and pour three pints of nicely-flavoured boiling stock on them. Serve very hot. Time, forty minutes. Probable cost, 8d. per pint. Sufficient for six persons.
A pea purée thinned with stock rather than a thickened soup, and it lives or dies on the freshness of the peas. Treat the stated time as an outer limit, not a target.
- The hinge: don't overcook the peasYoung peas are tender in five to eight minutes; the stated forty minutes is best read as a total for the dish rather than boiling time alone. Peas held at a boil past tenderness turn khaki and dull, and no amount of good stock will bring the colour back.
- A pint of peasA pint here is a dry volume measure of shelled peas, an Imperial pint being roughly 12 oz (340 g) — about 2 to 2 1/2 lb in the pod. Frozen petits pois are an honest substitute and often sweeter than fresh peas that have sat around.
- Three pints of stockThree British Imperial pints is about 1.7 litres (roughly 7 US cups), giving a deliberately thin, brothy soup. If you want something closer to modern pea soup, hold back a third of the stock and add it to taste.
- Spring onions and mint"Three spring onions" means whole scallions, white and green; "a spring of mint" is a printer's slip for a sprig. Both are lifted out before sieving, so they season rather than flavour aggressively — a single generous sprig is right.
- SievingPressing peas through a sieve with a wooden spoon or ladle is the period method and gives a fine, skin-free purée. A food mill on its finest plate does the same job; a blender is faster but leaves hull fragments unless you pass it through a sieve afterwards.
- Adding the stockThe boiling stock is poured onto the purée rather than the purée cooked in it, which keeps the pea flavour bright. Warm the mixture through but do not let it sit over heat, and season at this stage — the original assumes a well-salted household stock.
- Yield and servingSix small first-course servings, as stated, and best served in warmed bowls given how thin it is. A spoonful of cream or a few whole peas reserved before sieving make a reasonable garnish.
- The cost line8d. per pint is Victorian pricing, of a piece with the 'probable cost' lines that run through the book as a guide for household budgeting. It has no modern equivalent and is worth reading as period detail rather than information.
Green pea soup of this kind belongs to the short English summer when peas came in fresh and cheap. The name is often said to come from Chantilly, north of Paris, though that derivation is more likely folk etymology than established fact; in most modern usage "Chantilly" means sweetened whipped cream, but in Victorian and Edwardian kitchen French it attached loosely to several delicate pale pur English English cookery writers borrowed the label freely for dishes that would have puzzled a French chef. What is solid here is the technique: boil, sieve, and let good stock carry the flavour, the same method that produces the classic potages of the period. The absence of butter, flour or cream is itself telling — this is a soup built entirely on the quality of the stock pot.