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Cream, St. Germain
Plunge one pound fine split green peas in boiling water and let boil for two minutes; drain and replace them in a saucepan with three quarts cold water, one tablespoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper and a teaspoon sugar. Cover the pan and let boil.
Chop very finely one carrot, one medium onion, one leek, three branches parsley, one ounce lean, raw ham, one branch celery, four branches chives, four branches chervil, and half clove crushed garlic. Place all these articles in a frying pan with one ounce butter and let get a light brown colour, gently mixing meantime; then add all to the soup, also adding two slices French bread one-half inch thick. Mix the whole well with the wooden spoon. Cover the pan again and then let very slowly simmer for one hour and a half. Strain the soup through a sieve into another saucepan, briskly pressing the vegetables through the sieve. Skim off the scum. Shift the pan over a brisk fire and let come to a boil. Add one gill good cream mixed with two egg yolks and one-half ounce butter in small bits. Mix well with the wooden spoon, but do not allow to boil. Pour into a hot soup tureen, plunge in three tablespoons cooked green peas and serve very hot.
A classic French pea velouté, thickened with bread and finished with a yolk-and-cream liaison. Nearly all the risk is in the last thirty seconds.
- The liaison is the hingeOnce the cream and yolks go in, the soup must not boil, or the yolks will curdle into threads and no amount of whisking will bring it back. Take the pan off the heat, temper a ladle of hot soup into the cream-and-yolk mixture first, then stir it back in and hold below about 180F.
- A gillHalf a cup, so 1/2 cup heavy cream beaten with two yolks and 1/2 oz (1 tablespoon) butter.
- "Fine split green peas"Dried green split peas, not fresh. One pound is about 2 1/4 cups. The two-minute blanch and drain washes off dust and starch; it is worth doing even with modern packaged peas.
- The hamOne ounce of lean raw ham means uncooked cured ham: the end of a prosciutto or a scrap of jambon cru. Supermarket cooked ham gives less; a thin slice of pancetta is closer in effect than deli ham.
- Chervil and chivesChervil is often unobtainable; use an equal amount of flat parsley with a pinch of tarragon. "Branches" here are sprigs, not whole bunches.
- Bread as thickenerTwo half-inch slices of a real French loaf, crust and all, dissolve into the soup and give body. Soft sandwich bread turns it pasty; stale baguette is what is wanted.
- StrainingA blender or immersion blender does the work of the sieve in seconds, but pass it through a fine sieve afterward anyway to catch pea skins and leek fibre.
- SaltOne tablespoon in three quarts is about right for unsalted stock-less cooking, but the ham adds more. Salt at the start as written, then correct after straining.
- YieldThree quarts of water will lose some volume over the covered ninety-minute simmer; expect somewhat over two quarts of finished soup, serving eight or so as a first course.
In French kitchen shorthand, à la Saint-Germain means green peas, and it attaches to soups, pur ame name is traditionally traced to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, west of Paris, whose market gardens are said to have supplied the court and the city with early peas, though the derivation is not documented; the association was fixed by the nineteenth-century restaurant repertoire. The recipe here is the winter form: dried peas carry the body, while a spoonful of cooked green peas is dropped into the tureen at the last moment for colour, standing in for the fresh vegetable the name promises. The finish with egg yolks, cream and cold butter off the heat is the standard nineteenth-century liaison.