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Pea Soup
Shell a half peck of green peas. Wash the peas, put them in a soup-kettle, cover with cold water, boil twenty minutes. Take out one cup and press the remainder
The text breaks off mid-sentence, so treat this as a method sketch rather than a complete recipe: peas boiled in their own cooking water, most of them sieved into a purée, a cup held back whole for garnish.
- Half a peck of peasA peck is eight dry quarts, so half a peck is four quarts of unshelled pods — roughly 4 lb, yielding about 3 to 4 cups of shelled peas. That is enough soup for four to six.
- Soup-kettleAny 4- to 6-quart heavy pot. The recipe says only to cover the peas with cold water; since the peas are pressed and no other liquid is mentioned before the text breaks off, the cooking water is presumably meant to become the body of the soup.
- Twenty minutes is for old peasTwenty minutes is a long boil -- Young shelled peas or frozen peas are tender in 3 to 5 minutes, and long boiling turns them from green to army drab. Twenty minutes suits older, starchier peas.
- "Press the remainder"Forcing the cooked peas through a sieve or food mill, skins and all, was the period method and still gives the smoothest result — the skins stay behind. A blender leaves flecks of skin unless you strain afterward.
- The reserved cupThe recipe removes a cup of whole peas before pressing but breaks off before saying what becomes of them; returning them to the finished soup for texture is the obvious reading. Set them aside with a little of the liquid so they do not dry out.
- Where the recipe stopsThe page cuts off before seasoning and finishing. A common way to finish a pea purée of this kind is to thin it with milk or stock, thicken it with a small butter-and-flour roux, and season with salt, pepper and sometimes a little sugar or mint. Finish it that way, to taste.
Green pea soup of this kind belongs to a summer kitchen rather than a winter one: it is a fresh-pea dish, distinct from split pea soup made from dried peas that kept all year. "Green peas" in cookbooks of this era meant shelled fresh peas, bought in the pod by the peck. Buying vegetables by the peck and shelling them at home was ordinary domestic labor, and a half peck reducing to a few cups of usable pea shows why. The sieve-and-reserve technique here — purée the bulk, keep back whole peas for the bowl — is the same logic behind a modern garnish.