Home › Vegetables › English Pea Porridge
English Pea Porridge
1 pint of split peas, Stalk of celery, 3 quarts of water, 6 leeks, 2 onions, 2 ounces of bread, 1 pint of potatoes, 2 tablespoonfuls of butter.
Cut the onions into slices. Cut the celery into pieces. Put them with butter in a frying-pan, stir until a golden brown. Then put in the soup kettle with all the other ingredients, cook slowly one hour, skimming at the first boil. If the peas are not tender at the end of this time, boil a little longer till they can be easily pressed through a sieve. Press all through a purée sieve, return to the kettle, and when boiling, season and serve.
This porridge should be quite thick, and if it has the slightest inclination to settle, rub a tablespoonful of butter and two of flour to a smooth paste, stir into the hot porridge till it boils. Serve.
A straightforward split pea soup thickened with bread and potato rather than cream. The measurements are all by volume, in the style of the period, and the seasoning is left entirely to the cook.
- The volume measuresA pint of split peas is 2 cups dry, somewhere around 14 oz to a pound. A pint of potatoes means 2 cups peeled and diced, roughly 10 to 12 oz. Three quarts of water is a lot of liquid for that quantity of peas, which is why the recipe ends with instructions for thickening.
- The breadTwo ounces is about two slices of stale white bread, crusts and all, torn up. It dissolves into the purée and acts as a thickener; fresh soft bread works but contributes more water.
- Cooking timeOne hour is optimistic for most split peas sold now, especially older stock. Expect 60 to 90 minutes at a bare simmer, and follow the recipe's own advice: keep going until a pea crushes with no resistance under a spoon.
- LeeksSix leeks is generous and they are the backbone of the flavour here. Use white and pale green parts, split lengthwise and washed thoroughly, since grit hides in the layers and will not sieve out.
- The sieveA purée sieve is a conical or drum sieve worked with a wooden pestle. A food mill gives the same texture; an immersion blender is faster but leaves the skins in, so pass it through a mesh strainer afterwards if you want the original smoothness.
- SeasoningThe recipe says only "season", which means salt and pepper, and the dish needs a decent amount of both. Salt at the end rather than the start, since the purée concentrates considerably.
- The beurre maniéThe butter-and-flour paste stirred into the hot soup must boil for a minute or two afterwards or the porridge tastes of raw flour. Only use it if the soup separates; a well-reduced purée usually holds on its own.
- YieldPerhaps two and a half quarts once reduced, though the recipe gives no yield; on that basis six to eight as a first course or four as a main with bread.
"Porridge" here carries its older, broader sense of any thick boiled dish, not the oatmeal breakfast the word now suggests; pease porridge and pease pottage were staples of English cooking for centuries, made from dried field peas that stored through winter when nothing green was available. The nursery rhyme "pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot nine days old" records exactly how the dish was treated in practice: cooked in quantity and eaten down over days, thickening as it went. What marks this version as late nineteenth century rather than medieval is the technique laid over the old idea. The onions and celery are browned in butter first, the whole thing is forced through a purée sieve, and a French-style butter-and-flour paste stands ready in case it splits, all borrowed from the professional kitchen and offered to a household cook who was expected to own a soup kettle and a conical sieve.