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Pea and Bean Purees
An estimate of the food value of these purees may be inferred from the use made of these two dried vegetables in the rations of soldiers and sailors. Soak the beans or peas (split or Scotch) over night, then cook to a mush, rub through a soup strainer, and thin to the proper consistency with flavored stock. When unflavored stock is used, add some thyme to the vegetable while cooking. Add a little thickening to hold the vegetable solids in suspension.
A Heavy Vegetable Soup Put some lean meat two or three times through a patent chopper (so that it may be reduced almost to a paste), add cold water and chopped vegetables, cook long and slowly, and serve without straining.
A Nutritious Barley Soup Prepare lean mutton as in the last recipe, or leave it on the bone (removing all fat), add pearl barley, and cook to a thick puree, in which there should still be grains that have not lost shape.
Remove bones and large pieces of meat, and serve without straining.
Three related formulas given as method rather than measurement, in the style of a professional kitchen note. The proportions are left entirely to the cook, so the first job is to fix them.
- Working proportionsFor the puree, 1 cup dried split peas or beans to 4-5 cups stock gives a soup you can thin back; the legumes roughly triple in volume as they cook. The barley soup wants about 1/2 cup pearl barley to 6 cups liquid, or it sets solid on standing.
- "Scotch" peasScotch peas here means whole dried peas as opposed to split, which is what the recipe's own "split or Scotch" implies; they are usually taken to be the old field pea rather than the garden pea. They need the overnight soak; modern split peas do not, and will collapse in 45-60 minutes without one.
- Patent chopperA hand-cranked meat grinder. A food processor does the same work in seconds, but pulse rather than run it or lean beef turns to a gummy paste that seizes into pellets in the pot.
- Rub through a soup strainerMost likely a sieve worked with a pestle or spoon. A blender or immersion blender reaches a similar texture and loses less, though a final pass through a sieve gives a smoother result.
- A little thickeningMeans a roux or a flour-and-butter paste, about 1 tablespoon each per quart, whisked in at the end. Without it the legume solids sink and the soup separates into sludge and cloudy water in the tureen.
- Cook long and slowlyFor the heavy vegetable soup, 2 to 2 1/2 hours at a bare simmer; for the barley soup with mutton on the bone, 2 hours or more. Both benefit from skimming in the first twenty minutes, when the scum rises.
- Barley that keeps its shapeThe instruction to leave whole grains in the puree is the point of that soup. Add the barley in two stages, most of it at the start and a handful in the last 30 minutes, and the texture takes care of itself.
- SeasoningNo salt is specified anywhere, presumably because the stock was expected to carry it. Salt the legumes to taste; the old warning that early salting toughens dried beans is often repeated but not well established.
- YieldEach of the three, as scaled above, makes about 6 servings as a first course or 4 as a meal.
The opening sentence is the whole argument of the page: dried peas and beans figured in army and navy rations, and the book invokes that to vouch for their "food value." Pea soup thickened with a little flour and flavoured with thyme is a long-standing dish in English and northern European cooking, and the Scotch pea named here is generally understood to be the older field pea rather than the garden pea. The two soups that follow read as nourishing rather than formal cookery: lean meat put repeatedly through the grinder, and nothing strained away. Serving a soup unstrained sits at some distance from the clear consommes of a formal table, which suggests these were kitchen dishes rather than dinner-party ones.