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Cream of Scotch Pea Soup
1/2 cup Scotch peas 1 quart water 3 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 2 cups milk 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 1 tablespoon sugar Cook the peas six hours until tender in the quart of water. Rub through the colander. Add water sufficient to make one pint of puree. Heat the milk in a double boiler. Prepare a white sauce, made by rubbing together the butter, flour and a little warm milk. The white sauce should cook about ten minutes in a double boiler; then add it to the body of the soup. After the white sauce and puree have cooked for a few moments, add the salt and sugar, and serve.
A straightforward dried-pea puree finished with a milk-based white sauce. The only real obstacle is the six-hour cooking time, which assumes unsoaked peas and a coal range kept going all day.
- Scotch peasApparently a market name for whole dried green or blue peas. Whole dried green peas are the closest modern match; split peas will work but break down faster and give a smoother, less distinctly "pea" body.
- Cut the six hoursSoak the peas overnight in cold water, drain, then simmer in the quart of fresh water and they will be tender in about an hour to an hour and a half. Six hours reflects unsoaked peas on a stove that was already lit.
- Salt lateThe recipe adds salt at the very end. The old rule that salt in the cooking water slows the softening of dried pulses is widely repeated, though modern testing disputes it; either way, salting at the end here does no harm.
- Rub through the colanderA colander will not pass much; a fine sieve, food mill or a short blitz with a stick blender does the same job. If you blend, pass it once through a sieve anyway to catch the skins.
- One pint of pureeTwo cups. Much of the quart of cooking water boils away, so top up with hot water — or the reserved cooking liquid — to reach that volume before the milk goes in.
- The white sauceButter and flour rubbed together raw with a little milk is a beurre manié rather than a cooked roux. The ten minutes over water called for should be enough to lose the floury taste; whisk it into the hot milk rather than adding it cold to the pot.
- Double boiler, and whyA pea puree thickened with milk scorches easily and the milk can curdle against direct heat. If you use a heavy saucepan instead, keep it below a simmer and stir.
- The sugarA tablespoon reads as a lot for this quantity. Start with a teaspoon and taste.
- YieldAbout a quart of finished soup — four small first-course servings, or two as a main with bread.
Cookery of this era leaned heavily on dried pulses, which supplied the protein and the body that stock and bacon would otherwise have provided; a pea soup enriched with a milk white sauce is one answer to a meat-based potage. The "Scotch" in the name is often said to refer to the pea rather than to Scotland's cuisine egregional trade names in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century groceries, and Scotch or blue peas were reportedly the coarse, whole-seeded sort as against split peas. The technique here, a vegetable puree let down with milk and thickened separately with butter and flour, is the classic cream soup formula codified in the American cooking-school tradition, where the puree and the white sauce were typically made apart and married at the last moment to keep the milk from breaking.