Home › The Principles of Cookery › PEAS SOUP (another way) (Cut two ounces of lean ham)
PEAS SOUP (another way) (Cut two ounces of lean ham)
Cut two ounces of lean ham or bacon into dice, and fry them with a sliced onion in a little dripping until they are lightly browned. Put with them one turnip, two carrots, three or four sticks of celery, and one leek, all cut into small pieces, and stir the whole of the above ingredients over the fire for ten minutes more. Pour over them three quarts of water, boil, and add a pint of peas which have been soaked in cold water all night. Boil gently until the peas are quite soft, stir frequently to prevent burning, then add a little salt and pepper, a tea-spoonful of moist sugar, and a salt-spoonful of dried and powdered mint. Rub the soup through a sieve. If it is not sufficiently thick, stir into it three or four ounces of flour mixed smoothly with a little cold water. Boil half an hour longer, and serve very hot. Time, three hours. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A straightforward split pea soup built on a fried vegetable base. Nothing here is unsafe or unavailable; the work is mostly in translating the measures and deciding how much of the old thickening you actually want.
- A pint of peasThis is a dry measure, not a weight: an imperial pint is 20 fluid ounces, so roughly 2 1/2 cups, or about a pound of dried peas. The recipe does not say split peas; whole dried peas need the overnight soak it specifies, while modern split peas do not, though soaking still shortens the cooking.
- Liquid ratioThree quarts of water to a pint of peas is generous, which is why the recipe ends with a flour thickening. Start with 2 to 2 1/2 quarts if you would rather the peas themselves do the thickening.
- Moist sugarVictorian moist sugar is an unrefined or partly refined brown sugar. A teaspoon of light brown sugar is the nearest equivalent; at that quantity it reads more as a seasoning against the salt of the ham than as sweetening.
- Salt-spoonA salt-spoon is about a quarter teaspoon. That much dried mint is assertive in a pea soup, which is the point -- peas and mint are a fixed English pairing -- but add half and taste if you are unsure.
- DrippingBeef or bacon dripping, the standard frying fat of the period. Any neutral oil, butter or the fat rendered from the bacon itself will do the same job.
- Salt timingHam or bacon plus the eventual reduction means the soup can end up very salty. Season only after the peas have collapsed and the soup has been sieved.
- The flourThree or four ounces of flour is a heavy hand by current taste and will give a distinctly gluey body. Treat it as optional; if the sieved soup is thin, simmer it down instead, or use an ounce of flour slaked in cold water and boil it out fully so it does not taste raw.
- SievingRubbing through a sieve was the usual route to a smooth soup at the time. A stick blender does it in a minute, though passing it through a sieve afterwards still catches the pea skins and celery strings.
- Time and yieldThree hours reflects whole dried peas, even after the overnight soak, over a coal range. Soaked split peas are soft in 45 minutes to an hour of gentle simmering. Serves six to eight as a first course.
Pea soup is a long-established British dish: dried peas kept through the winter, cost almost nothing, and gave a filling meal from a scrap of bacon and whatever root vegetables were in the house. Cassell's gives the probable cost as eightpence for six to eight people, which places it firmly among the economical recipes the dictionary offered to households running on a fixed weekly budget. The mint is the English signature -- the same pairing that puts mint on fresh garden peas -- and the fried ham, onion and root vegetable base is a common opening in nineteenth-century soup-making, browning the aromatics for colour and depth before the water goes in. The London fog of the same era was nicknamed a pea-souper for its resemblance to exactly this: thick, yellow-green and opaque.