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Green Pea Soup
Put half a pound of dry green peas to soak overnight in water, with a teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda in it. In the morning take out the peas and put them on the fire in about three-and-a-half pints of water. When the peas are nearly cooked, add five big potatoes. When all is cooked enough for the skins to come off easily, rub all through a sieve. Fry in some butter four or five onions and five or six leeks till they are brown, or, failing butter, use some fat of beef; add these to the peas and boil together a good half-hour. If possible, add a pig's trotter cut into four, which makes the soup most excellent. When ready to serve, remove the four pieces of trotter. Little dice of fried bread should be handed with the soup.
A wartime refugee kitchen recipe: dried peas, potatoes, browned alliums and, if the household could get one, a pig's trotter. It works well, but a few of the quantities and timings need translating.
- The trotter goes in firstA raw pig's trotter needs two to three hours of gentle simmering to give up its gelatine; the half-hour at the end of this recipe is nowhere near enough. Simmer it separately in water from the start, or add it to the peas at the beginning and strain the pieces out before sieving.
- The soda soakA teaspoon of bicarbonate in the soaking water softens the skins of old, hard peas and speeds cooking. With modern split or whole dried peas it is unnecessary, and too much soda turns the peas to mush and gives a faintly soapy taste. Half a teaspoon at most, and rinse well before cooking.
- MeasuresHalf a pound of dried peas is about 1 1/4 cups. Three and a half imperial pints is roughly 2 litres, or 8 to 8 1/2 US cups "if the puree comes out too thick after sieving, loosen it with more water or stock."
- Five big potatoesAn unhelpful number by itself. Reckon on roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb (700-900 g) of floury potatoes, peeled and quartered; they are there to thicken, so waxy varieties will not do the same job.
- SievingThe rubbing through a sieve is the whole texture of the dish. A stick blender does it in a minute, though passing the blended soup through a sieve afterwards catches the pea skins and is worth the extra step.
- Browning the onions and leeksTake this slowly, twenty minutes or more over medium heat. "Brown" here means deeply coloured and sweet; pale onions leave the soup flat, since there is no stock and almost no other seasoning.
- SeasoningNone is given. Salt once the peas are soft (early salting is often said to keep the skins tough, though the point is disputed) and add plenty of black pepper.
- Yield and servingServes six generously as a first course, four as a meal. The fried bread dice are croutons: cubes of stale bread crisped in butter or the beef fat, handed round separately so they stay crisp.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled by Mrs Brian Luck in 1915 from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion, and it reads as a record of a displaced national cuisine written down in a hurry. The instruction "or, failing butter, use some fat of beef" is the book in miniature: dairy-rich Belgian cooking rewritten for people cooking in borrowed kitchens on wartime supplies. The soup itself is a everyday Flemish and Walloon type "dried peas stretched with potato, given depth by browned leeks and onions and a scrap of pork "and it belongs to the same broad family as Dutch erwtensoep and the split pea soups of northern France. Leeks are a defining vegetable of the Low Countries kitchen, and the pig's trotter, cheap and gelatinous, was a common way to give body and richness to a pot that contained no meat worth the name.