Home › Soups › Cream of Split Pea Soup
Cream of Split Pea Soup
1 cup split peas 2 1/2 quarts water 2 tablespoons chopped onions 3 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 1 pint milk Wash the peas, and soak tem over night in cold water. Drain, and rinse thoroughly, adding two and one-half quarts of cold water and the onion. Cook slowly until soft, and press through a strainer. Make a white sauce of the remaining ingredients, and add to the above. Cook together five minutes.
A plain purée soup of the sort that carried meatless Fridays and wartime menus alike. Almost everything here still works; the main adjustments are the soaking, the water, and how you get the peas smooth.
- The hinge: reduce, don't rushTwo and a half quarts of water to one cup of peas is a very thin ratio by modern eyes. The recipe says only to cook slowly until soft, but at that ratio you will need a good deal of water to leave as steam: simmer partly uncovered for 60 to 90 minutes and judge by body, not the clock.
- Soaking is optional nowSplit peas soften in about 45 to 60 minutes without soaking. An overnight soak does no harm and shortens the simmer, but skipping it costs only time.
- Straining"Press through a strainer" means a food mill or a wooden spoon against a fine sieve, which also catches the skins. A blender or immersion blender does the job in under a minute, though it leaves the skins in and gives a slightly coarser, more opaque soup. Sieve after blending if you want the smooth, pale result the original intends.
- The white sauceThree tablespoons butter, two of flour and a pint of milk is a thin white sauce. Cook the flour in the butter a full two minutes before the milk goes in so the soup does not taste of raw flour, and add the milk warm and gradually to avoid lumps.
- Combining without curdlingAdd the sauce to the pea pur ee rather than the other way round, off a hard boil. The final five minutes should be a bare simmer; the pur ee is thick enough that a rolling boil with milk in it can catch and scorch on the bottom.
- Salt and seasoningA teaspoon and a half of salt for roughly two quarts of finished soup is modest. Salt at the end, after reduction, and taste. There is no ham bone or salt pork here to season the soup, so pepper, a bay leaf in the simmer, or a little celery with the onion earn their place.
- YieldAbout two quarts finished, serving six as a first course or four as a main with bread.
Split pea soup is one of the older continuously made European soups, and dried peas were a staple long before common beans arrived from the Americas; the split, skinned pea breaks down into pur ee on its own, which is what makes the dish possible without long mashing. Recipes of this shape circulated widely in early twentieth-century American cookery, including in vegetarian and "meatless" collections associated with health-reform movements and sanitarium kitchens, and in books written with wartime and Lenten meat restriction in mind. Traditional pea soup gets much of its richness from salt pork or a ham bone; here that body comes instead from butter, flour and milk. The technique — pur ee a cooked vegetable, thin it with a b echamel — was a standard template of the period, applied in turn to celery, asparagus, tomato and corn.