No. 260

Cream of Peas a la St. Germain

Creme de pois a la St. Germain

Throw into boiling, salted water, two pounds of medium-sized peas, and boil them for ten minutes with a little piece of mint; drain them, then put four ounces of butter into a saucepan, and when warm, throw in the peas, and let them fry for a few minutes; moisten with white broth, adding a few lettuce leaves, about four ounces, and two ounces of onions; the lettuce to be cut up fine, and the onions minced; season with salt, sugar, and nutmeg, and boil until the peas are thoroughly cooked, then drain, suppress the mint, and mash them in a mortar, moistening them with two and a half quarts of white broth. Press through a sieve or tammy, and return them to the saucepan with a pint of veloute (No. 415); should the puree be too thick, then add more broth; warm it well without boiling, and thicken the soup with egg-yolks, cream and butter, (No. 175). Pour the soup into a soup tureen with some chopped up chervil, and a garnishing of extra fine peas.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's pea soup is built in the classical way: cook, purée, sieve, enrich. Two of the steps carry real risk of failure, and both come at the end.

The hinge: the liaison must not boilOnce the egg yolks, cream and butter go in, the soup is held below a simmer — Ranhofer says "warm it well without boiling" for good reason. Above roughly 180F the yolks curdle and the soup turns grainy; there is no rescue short of straining and starting the enrichment again.
"Two pounds of peas" is ambiguousThe Epicurean does not say whether this is weighed in the pod or shelled. Read against the volume of broth, shelled peas are the likelier reading; two pounds in the pod yields under a pound shelled and gives a thin soup. If you use frozen petits pois, skip the ten-minute blanch entirely — they are already blanched.
White brothBouillon blanc: a pale, unbrowned veal or chicken stock, made from unroasted bones so the soup keeps its colour. Use a light unsalted chicken stock; a browned or dark stock will muddy the green.
Velouté, No. 415A cross-reference to Ranhofer's white stock thickened with a blond roux. A pint of it is thickening as much as flavour. Without it the purée alone will be looser than intended.
Mortar and tammyA blender does the pounding in seconds. The tammy — a fine worsted cloth the purée was wrung through — is replaced by a fine chinois or a drum sieve; skipping it leaves the pea skins in, and the whole point of a crème is that there are none.
Colour and cooking timeTen minutes' blanching plus a second boil "until thoroughly cooked" will take fresh peas well past bright green. Modern practice is to cook the aromatics first and the peas only until tender, then purée at once, if you want the soup green rather than olive.
SeasoningSalt, sugar and nutmeg is the classic French treatment for peas, not a quirk — the sugar reinforces sweetness in older, starchier peas. With modern sweet varieties or frozen petits pois, add it cautiously or not at all.
YieldTwo and a half quarts of broth plus a pint of velouté and the purée makes roughly three and a half quarts — ten to twelve first-course servings. Halve it for home use.
The garnishReserve a handful of the smallest peas before puréeing, cook them separately and drop them in at the table with the chervil. Chervil bruises and fades; chop it at the last moment.

A Little History

A la St. Germain is one of the fixed labels of classical French cookery: in Escoffier's generation and Ranhofer's alike, it signalled peas, whether as a purée, a soup or a garnish for meat. The name is generally traced to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, west of Paris, whose market gardens supplied the court with early peas — the vegetable that seized Louis XIV's court in the 1660s and became, for a while, a genuine aristocratic obsession. Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York and author of The Epicurean (1894), was reproducing the Parisian repertoire almost intact for an American clientele, which is why the recipe assumes you already have white broth, velouté and a standard egg-and-cream liaison standing by, each with its own number. The book is less a collection of dishes than a system, and this soup is three of its components assembled.