Green Pea Soup
2 pounds peas 1 quart bean stock 1 ounce butter 1 spinach leaf Pepper and salt 1 teaspoon cornflour 1 gill milk 1 gill cream 1 onion Shell the peas, wash and string the pods, and put them into a saucepan, which one quart of boiling stock. Cook for thirty minutes, and then strain. Put the butter into the saucepan, add the peas and spinach leaf. Saute these for about five minutes; ten add the stock the pods were cooked in, and cook until the peas are tender. Rub through a hair-sieve. Return to the saucepan, and add the pepper and salt. Add the cornflour mixed with the milk; boil for five minutes. Then add the cream, and serve.
A two-stage pea soup: the pods make the stock, the peas make the body. The method is sound but the ingredient list and the instructions do not quite match.
- The onion is orphanedAn onion appears in the list and never in the method. Sweat it in the butter with the peas and spinach leaf, or halve it into the pod stock and discard it at the straining stage.
- Bean stockMost likely the cooking water from dried beans, haricot or butter, though the recipe does not specify. Any light vegetable stock works, or the water from cooking dried white beans if you have it. Keep it unsalted so you can season at the end.
- GillAn imperial gill is 5 fl oz, a shade over half a cup; American writers of the period often meant 4 fl oz. Either reading gives roughly half a cup each of milk and cream.
- CornflourBritish cornflour is cornstarch, not cornmeal and not flour. One teaspoon slaked in the cold milk is a light thickener only; the puree does most of the work.
- Two pounds of peasThat is 2 lb in the pod, yielding roughly 2 cups shelled. Frozen peas will do for the soup body, but then you have no pods and must use stock alone.
- Pod stock, thirty minutesPods are fibrous and need the full half hour to give up their flavour. Strain and press them hard against the sieve, then discard; they never go into the soup.
- The spinach leafA single leaf is there for colour, not flavour. If the puree looks grey, a small handful of spinach wilted in at the end brightens it.
- Hair sieveA horsehair sieve was standard equipment before fine stainless mesh, and hair avoided the metallic taste that iron or copper could give a puree. A stainless mesh sieve, or a blender followed by a sieve, gives a finer result.
- YieldAbout four servings as a first course. Serve promptly; held on the heat, the colour dulls and the cream can catch.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a run of books, often said to have wartime and Lenten origins, that had to build savoury depth without meat stock, and this soup shows the standard workaround: the cooking liquor from dried beans stands in for broth, and the pea pods, ordinarily thrown out, are boiled for a second layer of flavour. Green pea soup made from fresh peas was a summer dish tied closely to the shelling season, distinct from the thick yellow or split-pea potages eaten year round; English cookery writers had been distinguishing the two since at least the eighteenth century. The single spinach leaf is there for colour.