Home › The World's Kitchen › Country Family Soup
Country Family Soup
Procure two quarts fresh green peas, shell them, plunge shells in a gallon boiling water and scald for five minutes, then drain on a sieve. (Keep the peas for Wednesday's dinner.) Heat two tablespoons good lard in a large saucepan, add quarter pound lean salt pork cut in small pieces, two sliced leeks, two sliced medium onions and one bay leaf; gently brown on the fire ten minutes, add the shells, cover pan and let sweat ten minutes; then add four good-sized sound peeled potatoes sliced, one quart broth, and two quarts water; season with one and a half teaspoons salt and half teaspoon pepper. Lightly mix, re-cover pan and gently boil two hours. Remove, pass soup through sieve into a basin, then through a Chinese strainer into a soup tureen, and serve with a plate of bread croutons separately.
This is a thrift soup built entirely from the part most cooks throw away: the pods. Everything else is support for them, and the two-hour simmer is what makes fibrous pods give up their flavour.
- The pods are the pointNothing green and sweet from the peas themselves goes into this pot. Save the shelled peas for another dish, as the original instructs, and use only fresh, unblemished pods — any that are yellowing or spotted will make the broth musty. Sugar snap or snow pea shells work too and need less cooking.
- "Two quarts fresh green peas"Probably two quarts measured in the pod rather than two quarts of shelled peas, though the text does not say and "shell them" leaves it ambiguous. Shelling yields vary a good deal, so treat any weight or cup conversion as approximate.
- Chinese strainerA chinois — the fine conical strainer. The soup is passed twice: first through an ordinary sieve, pressing hard with a ladle or the back of a spoon to force the pulp through, then through the chinois to catch the fibre. Skipping the second pass leaves a stringy soup. A food mill and then a fine-mesh strainer does the same work.
- Fat and salt porkTwo tablespoons of lard can be swapped for a neutral oil or butter with no real loss, since the salt pork supplies most of the character. If you cannot get salt pork, unsmoked bacon or pancetta is closer than smoked bacon, which will dominate the peas.
- Sweating the shellsThe covered ten minutes after the pods go in is not filler. It draws moisture out of the pods and into the fat and aromatics before any liquid arrives, and builds flavour in the finished soup.
- BrothOne quart of unsalted or lightly salted stock — chicken or veal suits it. With commercial salted broth plus the salt pork, hold back the teaspoon and a half of salt until you taste at the end.
- The simmer"Gently boil two hours" means a bare simmer with the lid on. Two hours is long by modern habit but appropriate here: pod fibre needs it, and there is nothing delicate in the pot to overcook. Expect to lose a little liquid; top up with water if it reduces below about three quarts.
- Yield and servingRoughly three quarts, serving eight to ten as a first course. Croutons on a separate plate, as written, keeps them crisp; a spoonful of cream stirred into each bowl is a period-appropriate addition and softens the slight grassiness.
Pea-pod soup is peasant economy formalised. The pods — bulky, fibrous, useless raw — were the by-product of a labour-intensive shelling job; French and English household cookery both turned them into stock rather than waste them. The parenthetical instruction to keep the shelled peas "for Wednesday's dinner" is the tell that this belongs to a planned domestic week, not a restaurant service: one afternoon's shelling produces two meals — indeed, the day-of-the-week aside suggests a book arranged as a menu diary. A soup like this one, with its leeks, salt pork and bay, would have read as generically French-provincial — the sort of thing filed under a country name because it belonged to no particular town.