Home › The Principles of Cookery › Poor Man's Soup
Poor Man's Soup
Slice two onions, and cut four ounces of bacon into dice. Fry these in two ounces of good beef dripping until they are lightly browned. Add a large carrot, a turnip, a leek, and three or four outer sticks of celery, all cut into this pieces. Fry for a few minutes longer. Pour in six quarts of water. Let the liquid boil, then throw in a little more than a pint of split peas, which have been soaked for several hours in cold water. Simmer the soup gently until the peas are reduced to a pulp. Press through a sieve. Return the soup to the saucepan, mix with it two table-spoonfuls of salt, one of sugar, one of dried mint, half a table-spoonful of pepper, and half a pound of flour mixed smoothly with a pint of water. Boil half an hour longer, and serve. If preferred, the mint can be served separately at table, and taken or not according to individual taste. Time, varying with the freshness of the peas, usually about four hours. Sufficient for twelve or fourteen people. Probable cost, 1d. per quart.
A charity-scale pea soup built for volume and cheapness rather than finesse. Nothing here is difficult, but two things need adjusting: the cooking time and the flour.
- Scale firstSix quarts of water and a pint-plus of split peas feeds twelve to fourteen as written. Quartering the recipe — 1 1/2 quarts water, generous 1/2 cup split peas, 1 oz bacon, 1/2 oz dripping — gives three or four portions in an ordinary pot.
- Cooking timeThe four hours reflects peas of unknown age. Modern split peas will usually collapse to a pulp in something like 45 to 60 minutes of gentle simmering, and the several hours' soak the recipe calls for is largely optional with today's peas.
- The flour is the hingeHalf a pound of flour slaked in a pint of water reads as a bulking agent rather than a thickener for flavour's sake, a cheap way of stretching the pot. Whisk it in off the boil to avoid lumps (the recipe simply boils it for a further half-hour), and expect a starchy, porridge-like body. Puréed split peas thicken perfectly well on their own; leaving the flour out gives a better soup.
- SaltTwo tablespoons of salt into six quarts is roughly right for the volume, but salt to taste at the end instead, since the bacon (and any stock you use in place of the water) is already salted.
- Dripping and baconBeef dripping is rendered beef fat, still sold and worth using for the flavour; lard or a neutral oil will stand in. The bacon here is a flavouring, not a garnish, so streaky or a piece of unsmoked belly both work.
- "Cut into this pieces"Almost certainly a misprint for "thin pieces". Since everything is sieved, the cut only affects how fast the vegetables soften.
- SievingPressing through a sieve was the standard route to a smooth soup before powered equipment. A stick blender does it in seconds; pass it through a sieve afterwards only if you want it silky.
- The mintDried mint with peas is a deliberate English pairing, not an oddity. A tablespoon in this quantity is assertive — the recipe's own suggestion of serving it separately is sound.
The costing line — one penny a quart — is as much the point of this recipe as the method, and prices by the quart or the pound let a reader compare one dish against another. "Poor man's" in a late-Victorian cookery book signalled cheapness and volume rather than any particular institution. Dried split peas were among the cheapest keeping foods in Britain, storing well in a dry larder and giving pease pudding and pea soup their long place in working-class cooking; the pairing with dried mint is the same instinct that puts mint with fresh peas. The half-pound of flour whisked in at the end costs almost nothing, adds a little bulk, and makes a thin soup feel like a meal.