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Green Pea Soup
Put a quart of fully-grown green peas into a saucepan with three pints of boiling water and a little mint, leave the pan uncovered, and boil quickly till the peas are tender. Remove the scum as it rises, press the whole through a coarse sieve, and let it boil up once more. Add a lump of sugar, and salt and pepper. Serve as hot as possible. If it is preferred, half a pint of the peas may be put aside after being boiled, and added to the soup just before it is dished. Add a little spinach-juice, if necessary. Peas are in themselves so nourishing, that stock is not needed for the soup, which will be a better colour if water is used for it. Flavouring should be judiciously added. Be sparing in the use of herbs and spices, or they may overpower the flavour of the peas. Time, one hour. Probable cost of peas, 8d. per peck. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A pure vegetable soup that depends entirely on the peas, so the few decisions the recipe makes — no stock, no lid, fast boil — are all in service of flavour and colour. Read them as instructions rather than habits.
- The hinge: lid off, boil hardLeaving the pan uncovered lets the volatile acids escape rather than condensing back into the pot, which is what keeps boiled green vegetables green. Covering the pan will give you a duller, greyer soup.
- A quart of peasA quart measure, presumably of shelled peas though the recipe does not say — roughly 4 cups, somewhere around 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb. Buying them in the pod you need something like 3 lb to get there; 1 lb of frozen peas is the practical substitute.
- "Fully-grown" peasThe book means mature, starchy peas late in the season — sweeter modern varieties and petits pois are a different vegetable. Mature peas give the body that lets this soup work without stock; with very young or frozen peas expect a thinner result, and consider adding a peeled floury potato to the pot.
- One hour is for old peasThe stated hour covers boiling, sieving and boiling up once more, and fully mature garden peas took considerably longer to soften than anything sold today. Modern shelled peas are tender in 10 to 15 minutes and frozen peas in 3 to 5; boiling them for an hour destroys both colour and flavour.
- SievingThe "coarse sieve" step is now a blender followed by a sieve, which gives a better texture in a fraction of the time. Press hard on the solids and discard the skins left behind.
- Spinach-juiceRaw spinach pounded and squeezed, used purely as a green colouring in Victorian kitchens. It is optional and adds nothing to the flavour; a handful of spinach leaves blended in with the peas does the same job more simply.
- Mint and seasoningA single sprig is enough for three pints of liquid. The recipe's warning about herbs and spices is sound — this soup has no stock behind it, so anything assertive will read as the dominant flavour.
- Yield and priceFive or six servings, about three pints of liquid before reduction. The eightpence is per peck of peas in the pod, a volume measure rather than a weight, and the book offers it as a probable cost without comment.
Green pea soup belongs to the English summer table in a way that dried pea soup, its winter counterpart, never displaced — the two sit side by side, one made with stock and bacon in cold weather and this one made with water when the pods came in. The note that stock is not needed, and that water gives a better colour, reflects a late nineteenth-century interest in tasting the vegetable itself, and the mint is the same pairing that still governs how peas are served in Britain. The price given in pence per peck is a reminder that peas were a seasonal glut crop sold by the peck: shelling enough to fill a quart measure was work for someone in the household, which is why the recipe is described as cheap rather than quick.