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Green Pea Soup, Early Spring
An excellent, nicely-flavoured green pea soup may be obtained before peas are to be had, by those who grow their own vegetables. Take about four feet of a row of young plants a foot high; cut them off close to the ground like small salad, and boil the leaves in two quarts of stock until they are quite soft. Press them through a strainer, flavour with salt and a little pepper, and colour with spinach-juice, if necessary. A quarter of an hour before the soup is taken from the fire thicken it with a small lump of butter, rolled in flour. Time, about one hour. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A soup made from pea plants rather than peas — the thinnings from a garden row, cut like cress and treated as a leaf vegetable. It works perfectly well with bought pea shoots.
- What four feet of row amounts toYoung plants a foot high, cut close to the ground, give perhaps half a pound or so of shoots and tender stems from that length of row, depending on how thickly the row was sown. Bagged pea shoots or pea tendrils from a greengrocer or Asian grocery are a good substitute.
- Use garden peas onlyThe plant intended here is Pisum sativum, the edible pea. Ornamental sweet pea (Lathyrus odoratus) is a different genus and is not edible; do not cut a flower row by mistake.
- Two quarts of stockAbout 2.3 litres by imperial measure. The recipe specifies only "stock"; a light chicken or veal stock suits it, and a mild vegetable stock keeps the colour cleaner.
- The hinge: do not boil the greens for an hourThe stated hour is total time for the whole operation. Shoots simmered long enough to go "quite soft" do turn olive-brown, which may well be why the recipe offers spinach juice to restore the colour. Simmer the shoots 4-6 minutes only, purée, and the colouring step becomes unnecessary.
- Pressing through a strainerA blender followed by a fine sieve does the work of the original pressing through a strainer. Pea stems are fibrous, so the sieve is worth the trouble even after blending.
- Spinach-juice colouringVictorian kitchens pounded raw spinach, pressed out the juice and heated it gently to set the green. Skip it if you have kept the shoots bright; a handful of raw spinach blended in at the end does the same job with less ceremony.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manié — about 1 oz butter kneaded with 1 oz flour, whisked in in small pieces. It needs a few minutes at a simmer to lose the raw flour taste, not the quarter hour specified, and prolonged boiling after the purée will dull the colour further.
- YieldFive or six as a first course, as the recipe states; four in modern bowls.
Green pea soup was one of the fixed markers of the English culinary year, and this version exists purely to cheat the calendar. Kitchen gardeners sowed peas thickly and thinned the rows as the seedlings came up, and a cook who could turn four feet of surplus plants into a tureen of soup weeks before the pods themselves were ready had produced something out of season very cheaply indeed. That thrift, and the frank instruction to colour with spinach-juice, if necessary, tell you a good deal about the household this was written for -- one with a garden, a cook, and a strong sense that a spring soup ought to look green whether or not it naturally was. Pea shoots have been eaten as a green in their own right for a long time, particularly in Chinese cooking, where dou miao are stir-fried rather than boiled; their reappearance on Western menus in recent decades makes this recipe far easier to attempt now than it was for most of the twentieth century.