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Salt and Pepper (Put the stock on to boil When)
Put the stock on to boil. When boiling add the salt, then the peas, and other ingredients except the cream; boil until the vegetables are tender, then pass them through a hair-sieve with the stock they were boiled in, and again pass through a tammy-cloth, if desired very smooth; put all back into a clean stewpan to boil up, and just before serving add the cream and a teaspoonful of castor sugar.
The ingredient list has been lost from this entry — the title is a stray line from it — but the method is complete and follows the standard Victorian purée-of-peas formula: stock, peas, aromatic vegetables, cream and a little sugar to finish.
- What the quantities probably wereNothing in the surviving text gives amounts. A purée of this kind would typically be built on a light stock with shelled peas and a little aromatic vegetable; any figure you see quoted for this entry is a reconstruction, not the author's.
- Hair sieve and tammy-clothA hair sieve was a fine mesh of horsehair in a wooden hoop; a tammy was a worsted cloth through which the purée was wrung between two people holding wooden sticks. A food mill or blender followed by a fine chinois or a double layer of muslin gives the same result with far less labour.
- Castor sugarSimply superfine sugar. Ordinary granulated works.
- Add the cream at the very endThe soup goes back on to boil up before the cream goes in; once the cream is added, keep it below a boil, as hard boiling risks splitting it and losing the smooth finish. Warming the cream first stops it chilling the soup.
- Don't overcook the peasModern frozen peas are blanched before freezing and need three to five minutes at most; longer turns the colour from green to olive. Judge "until the vegetables are tender" by whatever else is in the pot.
- Salt timingThe recipe salts the stock as it comes to the boil. If you are using a seasoned or commercial stock, hold the salt back until after sieving, when the purée has thickened and the seasoning can be judged properly.
- YieldAs reconstructed above, about eight to ten first-course servings of roughly 6 fl oz each. It reheats well but should be brought only to a bare simmer.
Purée of green peas — the French potage St. Germain, a name generally traced to the market gardens around Saint-Germain-en-Laye that supplied Paris with early peas, though it is sometimes credited instead to the Comte de Saint-Germain — was one of the fixed items of the professional repertoire. Recipes of this kind were aimed at cooks in large private households and at the pupils of the cookery schools that spread through Britain after the 1870s, and they took for granted the labour that sieving and tammying demanded: the same soup passed twice, once through hair and once through cloth, purely so that no trace of skin or fibre reached the tureen. The teaspoon of sugar at the end is best read as a professional correction rather than a sweetener, restoring the sweetness that peas lose within hours of picking and lose further in boiling — which is also why the modern frozen pea, blanched soon after harvest, makes an unexpectedly faithful substitute.