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Green Pea Soup
Anonymous.
Four pounds of lean beef cut in small pieces, one-half peck of green peas, one gallon of water; boil the empty pods of the peas in the water one hour; strain them out ; add the beef and boil slowly one and a-half hours. Half an hour before serving strain out the meat and add the peas; twenty minutes later add one-half cup of rice flour; salt and pepper to taste; and if you choose, one teaspoon of sugar. After adding the rice, stir frequently to prevent burning.
A two-stage broth: the pods make the stock, the beef makes the body, and the peas themselves go in only at the end. The proportions are generous by modern standards and the whole thing scales down neatly by half.
- The pods are the pointSimmering the empty pods for an hour before anything else builds the sweet, grassy base that gives the soup its name. Do not skip it and do not substitute water; if your peas are shelled already, you have no soup, only beef broth.
- Half a peck of peasA peck of peas in the pod runs roughly 7 to 8 lb, so half a peck is about 4 lb unshelled, yielding perhaps 3 to 4 cups shelled. That should give pods enough to flavour a gallon of water.
- Rice flourSold today in Asian and gluten-free sections; it is finely ground rice, not glutinous rice flour, which behaves differently. Slake the half cup in a little cold broth before it goes in or it will lump, and stir often as directed since rice flour settles and scorches.
- Pea timingThirty minutes suits mature shelling peas of the sort a period cook may have had. Modern shelling peas, and frozen peas especially, are done in a few minutes and turn khaki and mealy beyond that. Add them near the end and let the rice flour thicken first.
- The beefFour pounds of lean beef, cut small, is being used as stock meat and is strained out and discarded from the soup. It will be exhausted of flavour but not useless; shred it for hash or a pie rather than throwing it away.
- Reduction and seasoningA gallon of water simmering for two and a half hours or more will lose a fair part of its volume. Season only at the end, once you know how far it has gone down, or the salt will concentrate past what you intended.
- YieldAs written this makes roughly 12 generous servings. Halving everything, including the pods, gives a manageable pot for a family.
Green pea soup belongs to the long English tradition of pease soups, and this version marks a moment of transition. The old winter soup was made from dried split peas, cheap and available year round; a soup of fresh green peas was seasonal, brief, and something of a luxury, which may be why nineteenth-century books print it as its own recipe rather than a variation. The instruction to boil the empty pods reflects a kitchen economy that wasted little, and it happens to be sound technique, since the pods carry a good deal of flavour. Rice flour as a thickener, rather than wheat flour or a roux, appears in American household cookery of the period, valued for thickening without clouding a broth or lending a pasty taste. The Home Cook Book was compiled from contributed recipes, and the "Anonymous" attribution here is typical of such subscription volumes, where many entries arrived without a name attached.