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Cream of Pea Soup
1 cup shelled peas Water to cover 1 pint hot milk 1/2 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour Salt and pepper 1/2 cup cream Almost cover the shelled peas with boiling water. Boil ten minutes and add the boiling milk, the butter blended with the flour, also salt and pepper to taste. Cover and bring to boil and place in the cooker for two hours. When ready to serve strain through sieve and add the cream.
A fireless-cooker recipe, meaning the soup is brought to a boil on the stove and then finished by retained heat in an insulated box. On a modern range the same result takes about half an hour of gentle simmering.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated wooden or metal chest, sometimes with soapstone discs heated on the stove, into which a boiling pot was sealed to finish cooking without fuel. A heavy Dutch oven off the heat, or a slow cooker on low, is the nearest equivalent; the point of the two hours is heat retention, not flavor development.
- Peas"Shelled peas" means fresh English peas out of the pod, about 1 lb in the pod for 1 cup shelled. A cup of frozen peas is a fair substitute and needs less time, since they are already blanched.
- Cut the timeTen minutes of boiling plus two hours of residual heat will reduce fresh peas to purée, which is what the sieve is for. On the stove, simmer the peas 15-20 minutes until soft, add the milk and thickening, and cook 10 minutes more before straining.
- Hold it hot, not warmIf you do use a slow cooker or an insulated pot, keep the soup above 165F and serve it within the two hours. A milk soup left to coast down through lukewarm is the one part of fireless cookery worth abandoning.
- The thickeningButter blended with flour raw, as here, is beurre manié rather than a cooked roux. Half a tablespoon of butter to a tablespoon of flour is a stiff paste; work it smooth and whisk it in off the boil, or the flour will lump.
- ConsistencyOne tablespoon of flour to a pint of milk gives a very thin soup by modern standards, which is intentional in a cream soup finished with cream. Double the butter and flour if you want something that coats a spoon.
- StrainingPressing through a sieve is what makes this "cream of" anything. A blender or immersion blender does the work faster, though a sieve afterward still catches the pea skins.
- Cream and yieldUse heavy or light cream, warmed, and add it off the heat so it does not curdle. The recipe makes roughly 3 cups: two generous servings or four small cups at the start of a meal.
Fireless cookery had a genuine vogue in American kitchens between about 1905 and the early 1920s, and a good many general cookbooks of that period carry a chapter on it. The devices were sold commercially as insulated cabinets, and thrifty households built their own "hay boxes" by packing a crate with hay, wool or newspaper around a tight-lidded pot. The appeal was fuel: a coal or wood range heated the whole kitchen whether you were cooking one pot or six, so anything that could be started on the stove and finished in a box saved both fuel and the cook's attention. Cream soups were favorite candidates because they wanted long, quiet heat rather than watching, and because a pint of milk and a cup of peas made a company course out of very little. The practice faded as gas and electric ranges made small, controllable heat cheap, though the same principle survives in the slow cooker and in the insulated thermal cookers still sold in Japan and Scandinavia.