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Cream of Pea Soup
One pint of peas (shelled); three cups of milk; one tablespoon of butter; three tablespoons of flour; one cup of cream, salt and pepper to taste. Measure the peas after shelling, cover with cold water, and cook until tender. When the peas are tender, take out half of them, and pass the remainder through a sieve along with the water in which they were cooked. Scald the milk, rub the butter and flour together, and add the paste to the milk with the peas that have been passed through the sieve. Stir until the soup thickens and, just before taking it from the fire, add the rest of the peas and the cup of cream. Season with salt and pepper.
A plain velouté-style pea soup from the Butterick book, thickened with a raw butter-and-flour paste rather than a cooked roux. It works, but a few of the proportions and methods want translating.
- What a pint of shelled peas isMeasured after shelling, a pint is about 2 cups, or roughly 10-12 oz — the yield of about 2 lb of peas in the pod. Frozen peas substitute directly and are usually sweeter than anything sold fresh out of season.
- Beurre manié, not roux"Rub the butter and flour together" makes a raw paste that is whisked into hot liquid and cooked out in the pot. Add it in small pinches while the milk is at a bare simmer, then keep the soup moving for three or four minutes so the flour loses its raw taste.
- Cook the peas briefly"Until tender" in a book of this period likely allowed for a longer boil than we would give peas today. Young or frozen peas need 3-5 minutes; longer and both the colour and the sweetness go.
- Save the cooking waterThe recipe sieves the peas along with the water they were cooked in, so that liquid goes into the soup rather than down the drain. If you want a thicker soup, hold some of it back.
- A sieve, or a blenderA food mill or blender does the work faster, but pass the purée through a fine sieve afterward anyway; pea skins do not break down and will leave the soup gritty.
- Do not boil after the creamThe recipe adds the cream just before the soup comes off the fire, so it is warmed through and no more. Milk-and-flour soups will catch and scorch on the bottom of the pan, and hard boiling after the cream is in risks separating it.
- Scalding the milkHeat it to about 180F, when it steams and shows bubbles at the rim. This is a holdover from unpasteurised milk but still helps the flour disperse without lumps.
- YieldSix to seven cups of finished soup, depending on how much of the cooking water goes in; six or so first-course servings. It is bland by design, and a bay leaf in the milk or a grind of white pepper will lift it.
Cream soups of this kind — a vegetable purée let down with scalded milk and bound with flour — were the backbone of the American first course from the 1880s through the 1920s, and general cookbooks of the era often carry a run of them: celery, corn, asparagus, tomato, pea. The Butterick Publishing Company was a dress-pattern firm, and its cook book was aimed at the same middle-class housekeeper who bought its patterns and read The Delineator, so the recipes favour ordinary ingredients and predictable results over French technique. The trick of reserving half the peas whole and adding them back at the end is a small, sensible touch: it gives the finished soup some texture at a time when "cream of" generally suggested something uniformly smooth. Green peas were among the earliest vegetables to be successfully canned and, later, frozen, which may help explain why this soup outlived its shelling season.