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Split Pea Soup
1 cup dried split peas 2½ quarts cold water 1 pint milk 1½ onion 3 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour ½ teaspoons salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 2-inch cube fat salt pork Pick over peas and soak several hours, drain, add cold water, pork, and onion. Simmer three or four hours, or until soft; rub through a sieve. Add butter and flour cooked together, salt, and pepper. Dilute with milk, adding more if necessary. The water in which a ham has been cooked may be used; in such case omit salt. 1 can kornlet
A straightforward puree thickened with a butter-and-flour roux rather than cream. Two things need attention: the stray line at the end, and the ratio of water to peas.
- The stray "1 can kornlet"This looks like a stray ingredient line carried over from an adjacent recipe and has no place here. Kornlet was a commercial canned green-corn pulp sold in the early 1900s and no longer made; ignore the line entirely.
- Water is not a misprint, but it is a lot2½ quarts to one cup of peas, plus a pint of milk. Much of it is meant to go off over three or four hours of simmering; if you cook covered or on a modern low burner, start with about 2 quarts and thin at the end with the milk.
- Fat salt porkA two-inch cube of unsmoked salt pork, roughly 4 oz. Substitute salt pork from a butcher, or a thick slice of unsmoked bacon; pancetta works, though it is cured with more spice. It is there for fat and salt, so taste before adding the 1½ teaspoons of salt.
- Sieve or blender"Rub through a sieve" was the standard route to smoothness in a period kitchen. An immersion blender does it in a minute; pass the result through a fine strainer if you want the smoother texture the book intends.
- Cooking the butter and flourMelt the 3 tablespoons butter, stir in the 2 tablespoons flour, and cook a minute or two before it goes into the soup. Raw flour stirred into hot puree will taste pasty and may lump.
- Milk goes in last, off a hard boilAdd the pint of milk after the roux and seasoning, over low heat. A pea puree this thick scorches easily once dairy is in it.
- Ham waterThe note about ham cooking liquid is worth taking up if you have it, and the instruction to omit the salt is not optional; ham broth is usually salty enough to ruin the pot.
- YieldRoughly 2½ quarts finished after reduction.
Split pea soup is one of the oldest surviving European pottages, and dried peas were a winter staple in New England long before Fannie Farmer set this down for the Boston Cooking School. Its placement under "Soups Without Stock" is the point of interest: the chapter exists for households that had no stockpot going, and here the peas themselves plus a cube of salt pork supply the body and savor that meat broth would otherwise provide. The alternative of using ham cooking water reflects the same domestic economy, where nothing with flavor in it was poured down the drain. The closing "1 can kornlet" is a stray line, most likely a printing or transcription artifact, carrying a fragment of the adjacent recipe for a soup built on a now-vanished canned corn product; since kornlet was not sold until after 1900, a text containing that line cannot be the 1896 first edition.