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Purée de Pois Verts
(Potage St. Germain.) Ingredients.
One quart of Peas.
One handful of Parsley.
A small bunch of Mint.
One quart of Stock.
One gill of Cream.
An ingredient list in the shorthand of a professional kitchen: the book assumes the cook already knows that a purée means peas cooked in stock, passed through a sieve, and finished with cream. A few of the quantities need translating.
- A gill of creamA quarter-pint, five fluid ounces, roughly 140 ml. Add it off the heat at the end; boiling cream into a green pea purée dulls both the colour and the flavour.
- A quart of peasAlmost certainly shelled peas by measure, which runs to something like 1¼ to 1½ lb / 550 to 650 g, or roughly 3 lb of peas in the pod. Frozen peas work, and are often sweeter than fresh peas that have been sitting about.
- The method is not printedPeriod practice was to simmer the peas with the herbs in the stock until tender, then pass everything through a fine sieve or tammy and return it to the pan to reheat with the cream. A blender plus a sieve does the same work in a fraction of the time.
- Cooking timeOlder directions for green peas tend to be much longer than modern ones. Fresh young peas need 6 to 8 minutes and frozen ones about 3; past that the green fades towards khaki.
- The mint and parsleyAdd the bunch whole and lift it out before sieving, so the herbs do not dull the colour of the purée. The 'handful of parsley' may well have included the stalks.
- StockA light veal or chicken stock would suit, though the book does not specify. Unsalted stock is safer, since a purée reduces slightly and concentrates the seasoning.
- Consistency and yieldOne quart of stock to a quart of peas gives a thick purée; thin with more stock or a little milk to the coating consistency of cream. Serves four to six as a first course.
Potage Saint-Germain is the classic French name for a green pea soup, and it is generally traced to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, west of Paris, whose market gardens were long associated with fine early peas — in the codified vocabulary of nineteenth-century French cooking, anything "à la Saint-Germain" involves green peas. Here it appears under the French title Purée de Pois Verts, with Potage St. Germain bracketed after it, both names French. The terse ingredient list also reflects how such books were used, as a memory aid for someone who had already learned the standard purée method and needed only the proportions.