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Vegetable Soup
Take a quart of old green peas, and boil them in a gallon of soft water with a small bundle of mint, sweet herbs, mace, cloves, and white pepper. Boil the peas till quite soft, then strain and pulp them through a coarse sieve. Put the soup into a stewpan with four heads of celery, the pulped peas, a small handful of spinach, one lettuce, two leeks cut small, a quart of young peas, and a little salt. Stew the whole gently until only two quarts of the liquid remain, and the celery has become quite tender. Add a good lump of butter rolled in flour about a quarter of an hour before the stewpan is removed from the fire.
A meatless English pea soup built in two stages: a long-boiled base of mature peas, strained and pulped, then a second cooking with fresh vegetables. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- "Old green peas"Most likely fully grown, starchy peas from the end of the season, as distinct from the sweet young ones called for later in the same recipe; period usage could also cover dried whole green peas. Dried whole green peas soaked overnight are the closest supermarket equivalent; green split peas work and will pulp more readily.
- Imperial measuresCassell's is a British book, so the gallon is 160 fl oz (about 4.5 litres) and the quart 40 fl oz (about 1.1 litres). Scaled to US measures you want roughly 5 quarts of water to 5 cups of old peas, reducing to about 2.5 quarts of finished soup.
- Soft waterHard water slows the softening of legumes, which is why the original specifies soft. If your tap water is very hard, use filtered or bottled water, or a pinch of baking soda in the first boil.
- Whole spicesTie the mint, herbs, mace and cloves in muslin. Otherwise you will be picking blades of mace out of the sieve, and a clove that goes through the pulping will dominate the pot.
- PulpingA food mill fitted with a coarse plate does what the sieve did, in a fraction of the time. A blender followed by a sieve also works, but pass it rather than skipping the straining, since the skins of old peas are what make the soup gritty.
- The young peas and greensStewing a quart of young peas, spinach and lettuce for the full reduction turns them grey and flat. Reduce the base with the celery and leeks until the celery is tender, then add the young peas, spinach and shredded lettuce in the last five to eight minutes.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manié: roughly equal weights of soft butter and flour worked together, dropped in in small pieces and whisked through. A quarter of an hour of gentle simmering afterwards cooks out the raw flour; a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil gives the smoothest result.
- Yield and seasoningAbout 2 imperial quarts (roughly 2.5 US quarts), enough for six or so as a first course. There is no stock or bacon here, so the salt does all the lifting; taste after the reduction, when the liquid has concentrated, rather than at the start.
Green pea soup of this kind is one of the oldest fixtures of English cookery, appearing in printed books from the seventeenth century onward and surviving into the Victorian household manuals with a broadly similar structure: tough old peas boiled to a pulp for body, young peas and green herbs added for freshness and colour. The pairing of peas with mint is an English habit of long standing, generally traced to the same period. What marks this version as belonging to the reference-book era is its frugality and its complete absence of meat, at a time when a soup without stock was a genuinely economical proposition. The method — build a purée base, reduce, finish with beurre manié — is of the kind that could be learned once and applied to any vegetable in season.