Pea Soup
1 can Marrowfat peas 1 slice onion 2 teaspoons sugar 2 tablespoons butter 1 pint cold water 2 tablespoons flour 1 pint milk 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Drain peas from their liquor, add sugar and cold water, and simmer twenty minutes. Rub through a sieve, reheat, and thicken with butter and flour cooked together. Scald milk with onion, remove onion, and add milk to pea-mixture, season with salt and pepper. Peas too old to serve as a vegetable may be utilized for soups.
A plain cream-of-pea soup built on a can of peas and a butter-and-flour roux, in the style of the Boston Cooking School. It comes together in about half an hour.
- Marrowfat peasLarge, starchy mature peas, still sold canned or dried in Britain and in some import aisles. A standard 15-oz can of ordinary green peas works; the soup will be sweeter and less mealy, so cut the sugar to a teaspoon.
- MeasuresA pint here is the US pint, 2 cups. Total liquid is a pint of water plus a pint of milk; after the twenty-minute simmer expect something in the region of four to five cups of finished soup, or about four servings.
- The rouxCook the 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour together for a minute or two before adding them, and whisk them into the hot pea puree off the boil. Dropping raw flour into the pot leaves a pasty taste.
- SievingRubbing through a sieve was the usual way to get a smooth puree in a kitchen of this period. A blender or food mill does it in seconds, but pass the result through a sieve anyway if you want it free of pea skins, which are slow to break down.
- Scalding the milkBring the milk just to the point where it steams and shivers at the edges, about 180F, with the onion slice in it. This is for flavour only, not safety; do not let it boil or catch on the pan bottom.
- CurdlingOnce the milk goes in, keep the soup below a simmer. Canned peas are not acidic enough to be a real risk, but a hard boil on a flour-thickened milk soup will make it grainy.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt assumes unsalted canned peas and unsalted butter. Taste before adding it all, since canned vegetables and modern butter are usually salted already.
This is a canned-goods recipe from the era when canned goods were still a selling point. Canned peas were widely available to American households by the end of the nineteenth century, and cookery writers of the period gave space to using them. The closing line -- that peas too old to serve as a vegetable may be utilized for soups -- is the older thrift habit surviving inside the new convenience: garden peas turn starchy within days of picking, and puree was a standard rescue. Marrowfat peas are peas left on the vine to mature and swell; the name is usually explained as a reference to their fat, marrow-like appearance, though that account is traditional rather than documented. They remain the basis of British mushy peas.