Pea Soup
3 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 3 cups scalded milk 1 tablespoon chopped onion cayenne and celery salt Cook peas, bay leaf, onion, and cold water twenty minutes. Press through a sieve. Make a white sauce of butter, flour, and milk. Combine mixtures, add seasonings, and serve. NOTE. - Cold cooked peas may be used instead of canned peas.
A standard cream soup of the Fannie Farmer school: a purée thinned with white sauce. Note that the printed ingredient list is incomplete — the peas, bay leaf, and water are called for in the method but never quantified.
- Missing quantitiesWork from the proportions of the sauce, which are fixed: 3 tablespoons each butter and flour to 3 cups milk. For the purée, about 2 cups of peas simmered in 2 cups cold water will give a soup of drinking consistency once combined; the original leaves the amount to the cook.
- Two onions, one recipeThe onion appears twice — once chopped in the ingredient list, once whole in the pea pot. Simmer a slice or two with the peas and bay leaf, and add the tablespoon of chopped onion to the butter before the flour so it softens rather than staying raw in the finished soup.
- Scalded milkHeating milk to just below the boil, until it steams and shows bubbles at the edge, was routine practice in this period, and is usually explained by the state of unpasteurised milk. Warm milk is enough today; there is no need to scald.
- Twenty minutes for peasLong for the peas this recipe assumes: canned peas need only be heated through, and frozen peas cook in three to five minutes. Overcooking dulls the colour and flavour of the purée.
- Pressing through a sieveA blender or food mill does this in seconds, but still pass the purée through a fine sieve afterward — pea skins are what make an otherwise smooth soup gritty.
- Celery salt and cayenneBoth were pantry staples then and both are strong. Add cayenne at the tip of a knife and salt at the end, since celery salt is mostly salt and the canned peas bring their own.
- Combining without curdlingAdd the hot pea purée to the white sauce off the heat, stirring, rather than the reverse, and do not let the combined soup boil hard.
- YieldAbout five cups if the purée quantities suggested above are used; the original quantifies only the milk.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer — one of many volumes issued by food firms in that era as advertising that happened to be genuinely useful. Its non-chocolate chapters follow the New England cooking-school orthodoxy of the day almost to the letter, and this soup is a clear example: nearly every cream soup in Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book follows the same formula of vegetable purée plus a thin white sauce, varying only the vegetable. The note allowing cold cooked peas is a thrift instruction of the kind that ran through household manuals before refrigeration made leftovers less urgent — cooked vegetables would not keep long, and turning yesterday's peas into today's soup was the expected use for them.