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Pea Soup from Canned Peas
Press a pint can of peas through a purée sieve. Put one quart of milk in a farina boiler and when hot, add the peas pressed through the sieve. Rub one tablespoonful of butter and two even tablespoonfuls of flour together, add to the boiling soup. Stir until it thickens. Add a half teaspoonful of onion juice, and a palatable seasoning of salt and pepper. Serve immediately. 4 good-sized potatoes,
A plain milk-based purée that comes together in about fifteen minutes. The one thing to get right is the thickening: a farina boiler is a double boiler, so the milk never truly boils, and raw butter-and-flour paste stirred into gently steaming milk will taste pasty unless you give it time.
- The stray line at the end"4 good-sized potatoes," -- does not belong to this soup; it appears to be the opening of the following recipe, carried over in the printing. Ignore it; there are no potatoes here.
- Farina boilerA double boiler, used for cereals and milk dishes that scorch easily. Set a bowl or saucepan over simmering water, or use a heavy-bottomed pan over low heat and stir often.
- Thickening in a double boilerMilk over water will not reach a real boil, so the "boiling soup" of the original is optimistic. Cook the butter and flour together in a small pan for a minute or two first, then whisk it in, and hold the soup hot for five minutes so the flour loses its raw taste.
- A pint can of peasAbout 15 oz, which is a standard modern can. Drain it but keep the liquid; the purée is thick and a few spoonfuls of the canning liquid help it pass the sieve.
- Purée sieveA food mill or fine strainer with the back of a ladle. A blender or food processor is faster, but still pass it through a sieve afterwards if you want the smooth texture the book intends, since canned pea skins do not break down.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a fine grater and press the pulp in a cloth or fine sieve. A half teaspoonful is a small amount of liquid; grated onion pulp itself will do, though it clouds the soup slightly.
- YieldA quart of milk plus a pint of peas gives roughly six cups, or four to six first-course servings. Thin with a little hot milk if the flour tightens it too much on standing.
- Serve immediatelyMeant literally. Flour-thickened milk soups form a skin and thicken further as they cool, and reheated pea purée dulls in both colour and flavour.
Turn-of-the-century American cookery books took canned goods seriously, and vegetable manuals of the period often gave parallel recipes for fresh and canned produce rather than treating the tin as a compromise. Canned peas were among the more common commercial vegetables, though their quality was notoriously variable and artificial greening was a live scandal of the period; a pur er with butter and flour and carried on milk rather than stock, follows what is generally described as the "cream soup" formula of the era, applied to whatever came out of the can. The onion juice looks characteristic too: it is often said that cooks of the day wanted onion flavour without visible onion or the delay of sweating it, so they grated and pressed it, a trick that turns up in the household literature of the 1890s and 1900s.