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GREEN PEA SOUP (another way)
Take a quart of green peas, fully grown, and put them into a saucepan, with two quarts of water, three lettuces, an onion, four ounces of lean ham, and a salt-spoonful of celery-seed, bruised and tied in muslin, and a small sprig of mint. Boil gently until the peas are soft enough to pulp. Strain the soup, press the vegetables into it through a coarse sieve, add a tea-spoonful of salt and a table-spoonful of spinach-juice if the colour is not good. Serve as hot as possible. Time, one hour. Probable cost, exclusive of the stock or gravy, 9d. per quart. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A straightforward vegetable purée that depends on the peas being mature rather than sweet and young. A few of the original's assumptions need translating.
- "Fully grown" peasThe recipe wants starchy, mature shelling peas, not modern sugary garden or petits pois. A quart of shelled peas is roughly 1¼–1½ lb (about 550–650 g), though the original does not make clear whether the measure is taken before or after shelling; frozen peas work but give a thinner, sweeter soup, so hold back some water.
- Lettuce as a soup vegetableThree lettuces means three heads of loose, soft summer lettuce — cos or butterhead, not iceberg. They melt down and thicken the purée; do not substitute a bagged salad mix, which is mostly bitter leaf.
- Celery-seed in muslinA salt-spoonful is about a quarter teaspoon. Bruise the seed, tie it in cheesecloth and pull it out before sieving, or the husks make the finished soup gritty and bitter.
- The lean hamFour ounces (115 g) of unsmoked cooked ham or a piece of gammon does the seasoning work here. Heavily smoked bacon will dominate; if that is all you have, use half the amount and add salt only at the end.
- Sieving is the hingeThe peas must be soft enough to break down under a spoon before you strain. Press the solids through a coarse sieve as directed — a blender gives a smoother result but also mills in pea skins, so pass it through the sieve afterwards regardless.
- Spinach-juice for colourA period trick: raw spinach pounded and its juice squeezed out, added off the heat as a green tint. It contributes almost no flavour, and it is optional. Boiling the soup after adding it turns the colour grey-brown.
- Stock or gravyThe costing line refers to stock, though the method says water. Light chicken or vegetable stock in place of the two quarts gives a much better soup; keep it unsalted so the ham and the teaspoon of salt do not overwhelm it.
- Yield and timingOne hour of gentle simmering, five or six servings as a first course. Serve immediately — pea purées thicken and dull as they stand, and reheating past a simmer flattens the colour.
Green pea soup was a fixture of the English summer table long before Cassell's, and the older recipes divide into two kinds: those made with dried split peas, eaten year-round, and those like this one made with fresh peas at the height of the crop. The use of lettuce as a cooking vegetable, common in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English kitchens and still standard in French petits pois à la française, has largely dropped out of home cooking; here it supplies body and a faint sweetness without starch. The instruction to correct the colour with spinach juice is telling — cooks knew that peas boiled for an hour lose their green, and vegetable colourings, from spinach for green to cochineal for red, were used to compensate. The price is given as ninepence a quart, exclusive of stock.