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Puree of Peas, Almond Milk
Prepare, strain and keep hot in a saucepan a puree St. Germain. Peel and pound quarter of a pound of almonds to a paste. Place them in a saucepan with a pint of cold milk and boil for fifteen minutes, then strain this milk into the puree; boil for ten minutes more. Skim the scum from the surface and serve very hot.
This is a two-part assembly: a classic French pea soup enriched with almond milk made from scratch. The recipe assumes you already know how to make a purée St. Germain, which the book gives elsewhere.
- Purée St. GermainA sieved soup of green peas (fresh or dried split), usually built on a light stock with leek or onion, a little salt pork or butter, and thinned to coating consistency. The recipe gives no quantity for the purée; something in the region of 1 1/2 quarts would suit the amount of almond milk made here, but that is a guess on our part.
- AlmondsUse whole raw sweet almonds, blanched in boiling water for a minute so the skins slip off. Bitter almonds, still sold in some European shops, must not be substituted in this quantity — they carry cyanogenic compounds and are not interchangeable with sweet almonds.
- PoundingA mortar gives the smoothest result because it crushes rather than cuts, but a food processor with a splash of the cold milk will get you to a workable paste in a minute or two. Dry-grinding alone tends to produce almond butter rather than a paste that disperses.
- Boiling the milkFifteen minutes at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, or the milk will scorch on the bottom of the pan and the flavour will carry through the whole soup. Stir it now and then.
- StrainingPress the almond milk through a fine sieve or twist it in muslin to get everything out of the grounds — the spent almond meal holds a surprising amount of liquid. The grounds themselves can be kept for baking rather than discarded.
- The second boilTen more minutes after the almond milk goes in is mostly for consistency; pea purée thickened with almond solids catches easily, so keep it moving and drop the heat if it starts to spit. Skimming, as directed, removes the pale scum that rises from both the peas and the almonds.
- SeasoningNeither element is salted in the text. Season at the end, once the almond milk has diluted the purée, and consider a little white pepper — the almond is sweet and needs a counterweight.
- YieldDepends entirely on how much purée you start with, which the recipe does not say; on the assumption above it comes to roughly 2 quarts, six to eight as a first course. It thickens as it stands; thin with hot stock or milk rather than water.
Purée St. Germain is the standard French name for a pea soup, generally traced to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where the kitchen gardens supplying the court were famous for peas in the seventeenth century — the craze for early green peas under Louis XIV is well documented in court letters of the period. The almond milk here is a much older idea grafted onto that base: ground almonds steeped in liquid served European kitchens for centuries as a substitute for dairy on fast days, when milk and cream were forbidden but almonds were not, and it survived into nineteenth-century professional cookery as a refinement rather than a restriction. Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, is often named in connection with this recipe, though the page itself does not settle the attribution; one might guess that a readership working from a repertoire of named mother preparations is why the recipe can open by telling you to have a purée St. Germain already strained and hot without further explanation, but that inference is the annotator's.