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Cream of Pea Soup
1 can peas 2 teaspoons sugar 1 pint cold water 1 pint milk 2 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon flour Salt and pepper Drain the peas from their liquor, rinse thoroughly, add sugar and cold water, and simmer twenty minutes. Rub through a sieve.
Scald the milk. Melt the butter, add the flour, and pour on gradually the scalding milk. Cook thoroughly, stirring carefully. Add to the pea stock, reheat and serve.
A plain white-sauce soup built on canned peas, from the era when a can was a pantry staple rather than a compromise. Two things need attention: the modern can is smaller, and twenty minutes of simmering does the peas no favours in the colour department.
- The canPeriod cans of peas were generally larger than today's, often a pound or more; a modern 15 oz can drains to roughly 10 oz of peas. One can still works, but the soup may be thinner and milder than intended. Two cans, or one can plus a cup of frozen peas, gives a fuller result.
- Pint means two cupsBoth the water and the milk are US pints, 2 cups each. The finished soup comes to about 4 cups, serving four as a first course.
- Rinse the peasThe rinsing is not fussiness: the recipe throws away the canning liquor and rebuilds the flavour with fresh water and sugar. Canning liquor was typically salted and could carry a taste of the can. Rinse even modern canned peas and salt at the end.
- Twenty minutes is for flavour, not tendernessCanned peas are already fully cooked. The long simmer exists to draw their flavour into the water before sieving. Ten minutes gets you most of it and keeps the colour from going olive-drab; if you want a green soup, simmer briefly and use a blender.
- Sieve or blender"Rub through a sieve" means pressing the softened peas and their liquid through a fine mesh with the back of a spoon, leaving the skins behind. A blender followed by a single pass through a sieve does the same job in a fraction of the time; the sieve step is worth keeping, as pea skins stay gritty however long you blend.
- Scalding the milkHeat to about 180F, when the surface steams and small bubbles ring the pan. It should not boil. Scalding is usually explained as a holdover from the days of unpasteurised milk; with modern milk it simply keeps the sauce from cooling as you build it.
- A very thin rouxOne tablespoon of flour to a pint of milk is barely a thickener. Cook the butter and flour together a minute before adding the milk, then simmer the sauce two or three minutes to lose the raw-flour taste. Expect body rather than thickness.
- Reheat gentlyOnce the milk sauce meets the pea stock, keep it below a boil. A hard boil on a flour-thickened milk soup invites curdling and a scorched bottom.
Cream soups of this pattern -- a sieved vegetable pur e let down with a thin b amel of American domestic-science cookery, taught in cooking schools as a single technique that could be applied to peas, celery, asparagus or corn with only the vegetable changed. The canned pea itself is part of the story. By the early twentieth century commercially canned vegetables were cheap, reliable and available year-round, and cookbook writers who a generation earlier would have insisted on fresh produce were now writing recipes that assumed the can opener.