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Cream of Green Peas, St. Cloud
Open a quart can green peas, drain off water, place and pound in mortar to a paste. Finely slice two ounces raw lean bacon, an ounce raw lean ham, a white onion, two leeks, a bean garlic, branch parsley, place in saucepan with a half ounce butter and briskly fry for ten minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Add the peas with a half gill white wine, quart water and quart and a half broth, season with a teaspoon each salt and sugar and half teaspoon pepper. Add quarter-pound piece stale French bread, mix well, let gently simmer for an hour, press puree through sieve into a vessel, then through Chinese strainer into another saucepan. Add a gill cream and half ounce butter, mix well while heating for five minutes, place bread croutons in a soup tureen, pour sauce over and serve.
A classic French purée soup built on canned peas, thickened with stale bread rather than flour. The method is sound; only the units and a few vessel names need translating.
- Gills and half gillsA gill is half a cup, so the half gill of white wine is 1/4 cup and the finishing gill of cream is 1/2 cup. Total liquid comes to about 2 1/2 quarts before reduction.
- "A bean garlic"Most likely a literal rendering of the French gousse d'ail (gousse = pod, bean): one clove, not a head. The recipe does not say which part of the leek to use; conventionally the white and pale green only.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. The recipe asks for two passes: a coarse sieve to break down the solids, then the chinois for texture. A food mill followed by a fine strainer does the same work, and a blender before straining will save effort.
- Pounding the peasCanned peas were an accepted ingredient in professional kitchens of this period, when fresh peas were seasonal. Frozen peas, thawed, behave the same way here and taste better. A quart can drained is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups.
- Bread as thickenerThe quarter-pound of stale French bread is the body of the soup; it dissolves during the hour of simmering and is what gives the purée its weight. Use genuinely dry bread, crust included, and do not substitute soft sandwich loaf, which turns gluey.
- SaltA full teaspoon of salt assumes unsalted homemade broth alongside the bacon and ham. With commercial stock, season at the end instead.
- The finishOnce the cream goes in, keep the pan below a simmer for those five minutes. Boiling after the cream will break the surface and dull the green.
- YieldAbout two quarts, serving six to eight as a first course. The croutons go in the tureen so they stay crisp under the poured soup rather than softening in the pot.
The International Cook Book (1906) was compiled by Alexander Filippini, who spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York and wrote for a readership that wanted restaurant French translated into English measures. Garnish names taken from Paris suburbs were standard in that idiom — Argenteuil for asparagus, Crécy for carrot, and Saint-Cloud, generally traced to the town west of Paris, for green pea soups of this creamed and sieved kind. What dates the recipe is not the technique but the bread: a stale loaf simmered into the pot was one established way to give a purée body, before roux-thickened cream soups came to predominate in American kitchens, and it survives here alongside the bacon and ham that carry most of the savour. The instruction to open a can, meanwhile, suggests that tinned peas were by 1906 acceptable in professional cooking rather than a compromise.