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RICE AND GREEN PEA SOUP (a French recipe)
Take a sufficient quantity of rice, and wash it four or five times in moderately warm water. Add some thin stock, and boil for an hour and a half. When the rice is cooked, add, about an hour and a half before serving the soup, some puree of green peas, taking care that they are well mixed, and are neither too thick nor too thin.
A skeleton recipe of the kind Cassell's prints under its "principles" heading: proportions are left entirely to the cook, and the timings belong to a coal range that was alight all day. A few decisions have to be made before you start.
- Quantities to work fromFor six, about 4 oz (generous 1/2 cup) of long-grain or Carolina-style rice to 2 quarts of stock, with roughly 1 lb of shelled peas made into the purée. That gives a soup thickened by the grain rather than a rice soup with peas in it.
- "Thin stock"A light second stock or a mild chicken or veal broth, not a reduced, gelatinous one. The rice will absorb liquid and the pea purée adds body, so anything rich to begin with ends up heavy.
- Washing the riceFour or five changes of warm water removes surface starch and dust. Modern rice needs two or three rinses at most; skip it entirely if you want the soup to thicken itself.
- The hour and a halfRice is cooked through in 18 to 25 minutes. Ninety minutes of boiling was meant to burst the grains completely into the stock, which is a legitimate result but not a subtle one. If you want whole grains, cook them to tenderness and no further.
- When to add the pea puréeThe instruction to add it "an hour and a half before serving" is the one thing to ignore. Long-held pea purée turns from green to olive-khaki and loses its sweetness. Stir it in five minutes before serving and heat through only.
- Making the puréeSimmer shelled peas in salted water until just tender, drain, and pass through a sieve or blend and strain. Frozen peas work well here and are often sweeter than fresh out of season.
- Consistency"Neither too thick nor too thin" means it should coat the back of a spoon and still pour freely. Loosen with more stock; if it is too slack, a few minutes uncovered will correct it.
- SeasoningNone is specified, as the stock was assumed to carry it. Salt, pepper and a little sugar if the peas are starchy; a spoonful of cream at the end is in keeping with the French treatment.
Cassell's flags this as "a French recipe" because the technique is the one behind the French family of purée soups — a vegetable pressed through a sieve and carried in stock, bound with a starch rather than a roux. Rice was one of the common binders for such soups in nineteenth-century French practice, giving a smooth, faintly sweet body that flour cannot; a related principle underlies the classic purée Saint-Germain, the green pea soup whose name is traditionally linked to Saint-Germain outside Paris, an area associated with early peas. Green peas themselves had been a marker of French cooking since the seventeenth century, when the court's enthusiasm for tiny early petits pois was notorious enough to be remarked on in letters of the time.