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Peas, Green, Soup, Without Meat, Economical and Excellent
Take a quart of green peas fully grown, but neither yellow nor worm-eaten, and put them into a saucepan, with three pints of boiling water, a tea-spoonful of salt, an ounce of butter, two or three sprigs of mint, a dozen spring onions, and a handful of fresh parsley, or a dozen leaves of spinach. Boil until the peas are tender, then strain off the liquor and preserve it. Pound the peas in a mortar, add to them the liquid in which they were boiled, and then pass the whole through a fine hair sieve. Bring the soup to the point of boiling, stir into it another ounce of butter, a dessert-spoonful of Bovril, a tea-spoonful of powdered sugar, pepper, and a spoonful of arrowroot moistened with water. Serve as hot as possible. Time, half an hour to boil the peas. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A late-Victorian purée soup that leans on mature podded peas rather than young ones, and gets its savour from a spoonful of meat extract. Nothing here is difficult, but two or three details need translating.
- The Bovril problemBovril is concentrated beef extract, so the soup is meatless only in the sense that no joint or bone goes into the pot. For a genuinely vegetarian version substitute a comparable quantity of vegetable bouillon paste or a yeast extract used with a lighter hand.
- A quart of peasThis means shelled peas, roughly 1 1/4 lb or 600 g, which is a great deal of podding — around 3 lb of peas in the pod. Frozen peas work, though they are picked young and sweet and will not give the same starchy, mealy body; if you use them, cut the boiling to five or six minutes.
- "Fully grown" is deliberateOlder, starchier peas are wanted here because they purée thickly and carry flavour. The warning against yellow or worm-eaten ones is the only quality control the original offers.
- Spoon measuresA dessert-spoonful is 2 teaspoons. The "spoonful of arrowroot" is unspecified — a rounded teaspoon slaked in cold water is enough to thicken three pints lightly; more will turn it gluey.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve, the standard fine sieve of the period; it is often said that hair was preferred because tinned metal could react with acidic food. A blender followed by a pass through a fine mesh sieve does the same job in a fraction of the time and removes the skins, which is the whole point of the mortar and sieve.
- Arrowroot handlingArrowroot sets almost immediately in hot liquid and thins again if held at a rolling boil. Stir it in at the point of boiling, as directed, then take the pan off the heat.
- Spring onionsTwelve spring onions means twelve whole scallions, green and white, not twelve bulbs of anything larger. Trim the roots and drop them in whole.
- Yield and costSix or seven servings, as stated. Tenpence is pre-decimal currency, given as a household budgeting guide of the kind this book's entries carry as a matter of course.
Green pea soup was a fixture of the English kitchen long before this book, made in two registers: the winter version from dried split peas and a ham bone, and the summer version from fresh peas, mint and spring onions, which is what this is. What places the recipe after the mid-1880s is the Bovril. Beef extract in that commercial form is generally traced to John Lawson Johnston, whose product was being sold under the Bovril name in London from the later 1880s, and by the turn of the century it had moved from an invalid tonic into everyday cooking as a shortcut to the meat stock that a busy or economical household might not have to hand. The recipe's title is telling: "without meat" here appears to mean without the expense and labour of a stockpot, rather than without animal products.