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Peas Soup
Peas soup may be made from dried peas either whole or split: the latter are to be preferred. Soak a quart of peas overnight. The next day wash and drain them, and put them into a large saucepan, with six ounces of lean ham, or if it is at hand, the knuckle-bone of a ham, three sliced carrots, two onions, and three or four sticks of celery cut into small pieces. Pour over these three quarts of the liquor in which pork, beef, or mutton has been boiled. Simmer gently until the peas are reduced to pulp, stirring frequently, then rub the whole through a hair sieve, and put the soup back into the stewpan. Let it boil, and skim it carefully. Add pepper and salt if necessary, stir in an ounce of butter, and serve as hot as possible. Send powdered mint or powdered sage to table on a separate dish. A table-spoonful of curry powder will greatly improve the soup. Time, four hours. Probable cost of the peas, 5d. per quart. Sufficient for eight or nine persons.
A frugal Victorian soup built on the water left from boiling a joint of meat. The two things to watch are salt and scorching.
- Salt before anything elseThe recipe's liquid is the liquor from boiled pork, beef or mutton, which in a Victorian kitchen often came from salted or pickled meat and could be very saline. Taste it before you commit, dilute with water if it makes you wince, and season only at the very end as the recipe advises.
- Quantities in modern termsA quart of dried split peas is roughly 1 3/4 to 2 lb, or about 4 cups; three quarts of liquor is 12 cups. Six ounces of lean ham is a modest piece; a ham hock or smoked knuckle does the same job better.
- If you have no pot liquorUse unsalted or low-salt ham, chicken or vegetable stock, or water with the hock doing the seasoning work. Cubes and concentrates push the salt too high for a soup that already carries cured pork.
- Cooking timeFour hours reflects the peas of the day and a slow range. Modern split peas collapse in 60 to 90 minutes; whole dried peas, even soaked overnight, want closer to two hours. Cook to the texture described - reduced to pulp - rather than to the clock.
- Scorching is the real hazardSplit peas settle and catch, and a burnt bottom taints the whole pot beyond rescue. The instruction to stir frequently is not decoration; use a heavy pan and a low flame, or finish it in a 300F oven with the lid on.
- The hair sieveA hair sieve was a fine mesh pushed through with a wooden spoon. A food mill gives the same silky result with the ham fibres and carrot skins left behind; a stick blender is quicker but keeps the fibre, so pass it through a sieve afterwards if you want the Victorian smoothness.
- Dried mint and sageSending powdered mint to table was a common English accompaniment to pea soup, and it still lifts the flavour. Offer a little in a small dish rather than stirring it in.
- The curry powderA tablespoon of curry powder for eight or nine servings is a light touch by current standards. Bloom it in the butter at the end rather than adding it raw, or the raw spice note sits on top of the soup.
- YieldEight or nine servings as the book says, and it thickens considerably overnight - thin with stock or water when reheating.
Dried pea pottage is one of the oldest continuously eaten dishes in Britain, predating the potato by centuries and surviving into the nineteenth century as the cheapest hot meal a household could put on the table - the recipe puts the peas at fivepence a quart, which for eight or nine servings was close to nothing. What makes this a distinctly Victorian version is the base: the liquor left from boiling a joint of salt pork or beef, a by-product that a careful kitchen never poured away. The split pea, husked and halved, is the book's preference, though whole peas are still offered as an option and overnight soaking is directed either way. The dish of powdered mint sent to table separately is an old English convention with peas of every kind, while the suggested spoonful of curry powder reflects a longer-standing English confidence that a little Anglo-Indian spice improves anything.