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Pea Soup
2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon salt 1 can Marrowfat peas 1 slice onion 2 teaspoons sugar 1 pint cold water 1 pint milk 1/8 teaspoon pepper Drain peas from their liquor, add sugar and cold water, and simmer twenty minutes. Rub through a sieve, reheat, and thicken with butter and flour cooked together. Scald milk with onion, remove onion, and add milk to pea mixture, season with salt and pepper. Peas too old to serve as a vegetable may be utilized for soups.
A plain cream soup built on a white sauce rather than stock, which is why it sits in the "Soups Without Stock" chapter. Nearly all of it translates directly; only the peas and the straining need thought.
- Marrowfat peasMarrowfats are large, starchy, fully mature peas, canned when past the sweet stage. A 15-oz can of ordinary canned peas works, or about 2 cups of frozen peas simmered a few minutes longer; the sugar may well be there to compensate for peas that have lost their own sweetness, though the recipe does not say so.
- Pints and tablespoonsA pint here is 2 cups, so there are 4 cups of liquid in all: a pint of water simmered into the peas and passed through the sieve with them, plus a pint of scalded milk. The 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour make a light roux for that volume.
- The sieveRubbing through a sieve was the standard puree method. A blender or immersion blender does it in seconds, but pass the result through a strainer anyway if you want the smooth texture the book intends / the skins of mature peas stay gritty.
- Order of operationsThicken the hot pea puree with the cooked butter-and-flour, then add the scalded milk. Adding cold milk to the roux instead is easier to lump.
- Scalding with onionHeat the milk with the onion slice just until it steams and shivers at the edges, around 180F, then lift the onion out. This is a flavour infusion, not a safety step; with pasteurized milk the only reason to scald is the onion and a smoother blend.
- After the milk goes inKeep the finished soup below a boil. A milk-and-flour soup at a rolling boil will catch on the pan bottom.
- YieldThe two pints of liquid plus the pea puree make well over a quart. Season at the end / canned peas vary a great deal in salt, so taste before adding the full teaspoon.
This is a cream soup in the strict Boston Cooking School sense: a vegetable pur he a butter-and-flour roux, the same formula Fannie Farmer applies to celery, asparagus, corn and tomato in the same chapter. Its presence tells you two things about the American kitchen around 1900. First, canned goods had become respectable enough that the book treats a can as an ordinary pantry item rather than a compromise. Second, the closing line about peas "too old to serve as a vegetable" is pure household economy, the same instinct that runs through the whole soup section: a pur a sieve will rescue produce that has gone starchy and dull on the plate. The scalded milk infused with a single slice of onion might be read as a domesticated echo of the French b though that lineage is interpretation rather than documented.