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Pea Soup
Put over the fire in four quarts of water or broth a ham bone, bones of roasted beef or mutton, two heads of celery washed and trimmed, four onions peeled and one and one-half pounds of split peas. Let it boil till the peas are quite soft, take out the bones and rub peas and vegetables through a sieve, return them to the soup, add salt and pepper to taste and boil it for an hour, skimming it when required. Spinach or green peas added when the bones are taken out improves the soup very much.
A straightforward stockpot soup that needs only a few clarifications on quantities, timing and the sieving step.
- Scale and yieldFour quarts of liquid with a pound and a half of peas makes roughly 12 to 16 servings. Halve it for a household batch; the proportion of about one quart of liquid per 6 oz of split peas holds at any size.
- "Two heads of celery"In 1896 a head of celery is the whole bunch, not a single rib. Two bunches, trimmed of root and any bruised outer stalks, is a lot of celery for four quarts but correct as written — it is doing much of the flavouring work alongside the bone.
- The bonesA ham bone is the one that matters; it supplies the salt, smoke and gelatin. Ask a butcher for a smoked hock or shank end if you cannot get a bone from a whole ham. Roast beef or mutton bones alone give a much plainer soup.
- Cooking timeSplit peas "quite soft" takes 60 to 90 minutes at a bare simmer, longer if the peas are old. No soaking is needed. Keep the heat low — a hard boil scorches the peas onto the bottom of the pot before they collapse.
- Salt last, as instructedThe recipe adds salt and pepper only after the bone comes out and the purée is returned. A ham bone can carry the soup most of the way to salty on its own, so taste before adding any.
- SievingRubbing through a sieve with a wooden spoon or ladle is still the best route to the smooth texture Oscar wanted, but a blender or immersion blender does it in a minute. Either way, fish out the bones first or you will chip a blade.
- The second hour of boilingAn hour after puréeing is longer than needed today and will thicken the soup considerably. Thirty minutes is enough to marry the flavours; add water or broth if it tightens past the consistency you want.
- The green additionThe recipe adds spinach or green peas when the bones are taken out, so they cook through the final hour. For brighter colour and taste, hold them until the last five minutes instead. Frozen peas work.
Split pea soup with a ham bone is one of the oldest surviving European kitchen economies — dried peas kept through the winter, and a bone that had already served its main purpose at table gave a second dinner from what was otherwise waste. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's book is telling: he was maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, a hotel famous for luxury, yet a considerable part of this collection is unglamorous household cookery of exactly this sort. The instruction to press everything through a sieve reflects a common expectation of the period that a soup of this class be a smooth purée rather than a rustic broth; the sieve, or tamis, was a hard-worked tool in a nineteenth-century commercial kitchen.