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GREEN PEA SOUP (maigre, or without meat)
Boil half a gallon of water, with a tea-spoonful of salt, in an enamelled stewpan. Skim well, and throw in a quart of fully-grown fresh green peas until they are sufficiently tender, then press all through a sieve. Put the hearts of two lettuces, a handful of young spinach-leaves, a sprig of parsley, and a sprig of mint, all finely shredded, and a large onion sliced, into a saucepan, with about a quarter of a pound of butter. Let these ingredients stew gently for half an hour; strain the butter from them, and pour over them the pulp, etc. Simmer half an hour longer. Just before serving add a pint of young green peas, already cooked. A sliced cucumber is often added to this soup, and is an improvement, but, of course, increases the expense. Season with salt and cayenne, and serve as hot as possible. Probable cost, 2s. for this quantity. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
A Victorian fast-day soup that gets its body entirely from sieved peas and stewed greens. Two things matter: the peas should be mature rather than sugary, and the aromatics are sweated in butter that is then poured off.
- "Maigre" explainedMaigre means a dish made without meat or meat stock, for fast days. Nothing here needs replacing to keep it meatless — the whole point of the recipe is that water and vegetables do the work of broth.
- Half a gallonCassell's is working in imperial measure, so half a gallon is about 9½ US cups (2.3 litres). It reduces over the half-hour of simmering; expect to finish with rather less.
- A quart of peasAn imperial quart of shelled peas is roughly 1½ lb, about 700 g — perhaps 3 lb of peas in the pod. Frozen peas work, but choose ordinary garden peas rather than petits pois.
- "Fully-grown" peasThe instruction is deliberate. Older, starchier peas thicken the purée and give the soup its texture; very young sugar peas will leave it thin and cloyingly sweet. The young peas are held back for the final garnish.
- SievingPressing hot peas through a sieve is the period method and still gives the smoothest result. A food mill on its finest plate does the same job; a blender is faster but leaves skin fragments unless you pass it through a sieve afterwards.
- Straining the butterA quarter pound of butter is a sweating medium here, not an enrichment — it is drained off after the half hour and the vegetables go on without it. Save it for another use, or return a spoonful at the end if you want the richness.
- The final peasThe pint of cooked young peas goes in "just before serving" and should only be warmed through; held in the simmering soup they lose their colour.
- Cucumber and seasoningIf adding cucumber, peel, seed and slice it into the butter stew with the other vegetables. Cayenne rather than black pepper is the period choice and keeps the soup looking clean; add it in pinches, tasting as you go.
- YieldEight to ten servings as written, as a first course. The "probable cost, 2s." is the book's own household budgeting note and refers to late nineteenth-century British money.
Cassell's separates soups maigre from the meat-stock soups it also gives, a habit inherited directly from French practice, where cuisine maigre meant the cooking permitted on Fridays and through Lent. English cookery books of the period kept the category even for readers who were not observing fasts, and it may be relevant that a soup made without stock was simply cheaper — hence the careful note that cucumber "increases the expense." The green pea soup itself is a very old English dish, and the combination of peas with lettuce, spinach, onion and mint is essentially the same set of ingredients used for stewed peas since the seventeenth century; the mint in particular is a long-standing English pairing with peas rather than a French one. The recipe finishes with the sieve, giving a smooth purée rather than a broth with whole vegetables floating in it.