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Green Pea Soup
Boil one quart peas in two quarts water, and two thin slices bacon. When done mash through a colander; then put back in the san water, throwing away the slices of bacon. Season with pepper, salt, spoonful butter rolled in flour. Boil well again. Toast some bread and cut in slices, and put in the tureen when the soup is served. The hulls of green peas with answer; boil them well with a few peas, then season as above and boil. Two hours will be enough to boil green pea soup--Mrs. W.
Green Pea Soup.
Boil half a peck of peas in one and a half gallons water, till perfectly done. Take out, mash and strain through a colander, then pour a little of the water well boiled over them, to sepa rate the pulp from the hull. Return it to the water they were boiled in; chop up one large or two small onions; fry them in smallest quantity of lard, not to brown them. Add this with chopped thyme, parsley, pepper and salt.
Just before taking off the fire stir in one tablespoonful butter. If the soup is too thin, cream a little butter with flour to thicken.--Mrs. I.
Two versions of the same soup, one thickened with a butter-and-flour roll and one built on fried onion and herbs. Both are workable, but the timings belong to an era of tough field peas rather than sweet garden or frozen peas.
- Ignore the two hoursThe instruction to boil green pea soup for two hours will leave you with a grey-brown purée. Fresh shelled peas are tender in 8-12 minutes and frozen peas in about 5; simmer only until they crush easily, then purée and reheat. The long boil made sense for late-season peas that had gone starchy in the pod.
- Typos in the original"Put back in the san water" is the same water, and "the hulls of green peas with answer" is will answer. Neither changes the method.
- Half a peckA peck is a dry measure of 8 quarts, so half a peck is 4 quarts. Mrs. I. probably means peas in the pod, which is roughly 3½-4 lb unshelled and yields perhaps 1¼ lb (3-4 cups) shelled. The first recipe's quart of peas is most likely shelled peas, a pound or so.
- The pod puréeBoiling the hulls is not thrift for its own sake -- pea pods carry a great deal of flavour. Simmer them 20-30 minutes, then press hard through a sieve or colander; the fibrous skins will not go through, and that residue is what you discard. A blender plus a fine sieve does the job faster than a colander alone.
- Liquid ratioA gallon and a half of water to half a peck of peas gives a very thin soup by modern taste. Start with about half that liquid, purée, and thin to the consistency you want; the butter-and-flour thickening at the end is there precisely because the original is watery.
- Butter rolled in flourEqual parts softened butter and flour worked to a paste (beurre manié), whisked into the simmering soup in small pieces. Give it two or three minutes to cook out the raw flour taste, no longer.
- The baconTwo thin slices simmered in the water and then thrown away is a seasoning technique, not an ingredient. Modern bacon is generally cured and smoked differently from nineteenth-century side meat; one slice may be plenty, and a piece of salt pork or a ham bone may be closer to what Mrs. W. had.
- YieldThe first recipe serves four to six; the second, made with the full half-peck, serves ten to twelve. Toast cut in slices and laid in the tureen softens into the soup -- serve the toast separately if you would rather it stayed crisp.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, prints recipes as they were sent in, initials and all -- hence two green pea soups side by side, one from Mrs. W. and one from Mrs. I., disagreeing about onions and about quantity. Pea soup made from the pods rather than the peas is an old kitchen economy found across English and American cookery: the shelled peas went to the table as a vegetable and the hulls, which are sweet and grassy, made the next day's soup. Both versions here are of the plain sort, thickened with butter and flour and set off with toast in the tureen, rather than the richer cream-and-stock purées that French-influenced cookbooks of the same decade were promoting. The reliance on a slice or two of bacon for depth of flavour, then discarded, is characteristic of the book as a whole, where cured pork does much of the work that stock does elsewhere.