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Split Pea Soup (Cup split peas cup peanut)
1 cup split peas 1/4 cup peanut butter 1 potato about the size of a butternut 1 onion about the size of a walnut 1 1/2 teaspoons salt Wash the peas, and soak them overnight. In the morning put them to cook in cold water with the peanut butter, the onion, and the potato, which has been scrubbed and sliced without peeling. Cook slowly four or five hours till the peas are thoroughly softened. The creamy, rich consistency of this soup, as well as of bean and lentil soups, is obtained by long cooking. If the peas or beans or lentils are not sufficiently cooked, they will be mealy and will settle to the bottom of the soup. Rub the whole through a colander. Add salt, and enough water to make of the proper consistency, and reheat. This should make about one quart of soup.
The peanut butter, potato, and onion may be omitted, and the soup seasoned with cream or milk or with one-eighth to one-fourth cup of oil or butter. The peas can be cooked in a double boiler almost as quickly as if cooked directly over the stove, and there will be no danger of scorching them. Bean soup can be made by the same recipe, using any kind of dried beans in place of the peas.
A plain vegetarian pea soup that leans on peanut butter for the fat and body that a ham bone would normally supply. Most of the work is unattended, and the one thing worth changing is the cooking time.
- Cooking timeFour or five hours likely reflects older, coarser split peas and slower stovetops. Modern split peas collapse in 45 to 60 minutes of gentle simmering, and the same creamy result is reached with far less water lost to evaporation.
- SoakingSplit peas do not require an overnight soak; they have no skins to soften. The soak does no harm and shortens the simmer slightly, but skipping it costs nothing.
- The water is unstatedStart with about 6 cups of cold water to 1 cup of peas, adding more if the pan runs dry. The recipe expects you to thin the finished puree back to a pourable consistency, so err on the side of a thicker pot.
- "About the size of a butternut"A butternut is the nut of the white walnut, roughly two inches long, so this is a very small potato, perhaps 3 oz; the walnut-sized onion is smaller still, maybe 1 oz. Both are there for background sweetness rather than bulk.
- Peanut butterUse unsweetened natural peanut butter. Modern stabilised brands carry added sugar and hydrogenated fat, which push the soup toward a satay flavour the original never intended.
- Salt at the endThe 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt goes in after the peas have broken down. Cooks have long held that salted water slows the softening of pulses, though modern testing suggests the effect is slight; either way, salting at the end does no harm.
- SievingRubbing through a colander is the period method for a smooth puree. A stick blender does the same job in under a minute, though a food mill gives the closer texture if you want to hold back skins and fibre.
- ScorchingPeanut butter and starch both catch on the bottom of a pan. The double-boiler suggestion is sensible; a heavy-based pot over low heat with occasional stirring works as well.
- YieldAbout one quart, which is two generous or three modest servings.
Good Food and How to Prepare It belongs to the American health-reform cookery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a tradition in which meat was set aside and nuts were promoted as its nutritional replacement. Peanut butter, which moved from sanitarium kitchens into ordinary American households around the turn of the century, was prized in these books precisely for this purpose: it delivered fat and protein into a soup that would otherwise have relied on a ham hock or a bacon rind. The note that the peanut butter, potato and onion "may be omitted" and cream, milk, oil or butter used instead shows the author writing for readers at different points along the dietary spectrum. The instruction that long cooking, not thickening, produces creaminess is the genuinely useful piece of technique here, and it holds as true now as it did then -- underdone pulses stay mealy and sink.