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Puree of Peas with Vermicelli
Prepare and keep hot a puree St. Germain. Crack four ounces vermicelli, plunge in a pint of boiling water with half teaspoon salt and boil for fifteen minutes, drain on a sieve, add to the puree, boil for five minutes, pour in a soup tureen and serve.
A two-line assembly recipe that assumes you already have a pot of purée St. Germain — the classic French split-pea purée soup — standing hot on the stove. Everything here depends on that base.
- Purée St. GermainA thick soup of peas (split, or fresh green) cooked with onion, leek and stock, then sieved and finished with butter and often cream. The recipe gives no quantity for the base; if yours is thicker than heavy cream, loosen it with stock before the vermicelli goes in.
- Four ounces vermicelliAbout 115 g of the fine sort. "Crack" means break it into short lengths so it spoons up with the soup.
- Cook the pasta separately for a reasonCook the pasta separately -- The recipe gives no reason, but boiling the vermicelli in plain salted water and draining it keeps loose starch out of the purée, which would otherwise thicken further. Do not skip the draining step.
- Fifteen minutes is too longModern dried vermicelli is done in 3 to 5 minutes, and it then gets five more in the soup. Boil it until barely tender and no further, or it will collapse into threads.
- A pint of water is not enoughOne pint for four ounces of pasta will go gluey and boil dry. Use two to three quarts of well-salted water and drain.
- Final seasoningSalt the pasta water properly but season the purée itself at the end, after the pasta has gone in — the drained vermicelli dilutes the seasoning slightly.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield, and it depends entirely on how much purée you have made. Serve immediately; the vermicelli keeps absorbing liquid and the soup stiffens as it stands.
Purée St. Germain is one of the fixed points of the French classical repertoire, a pea soup whose name is generally traced to Saint-Germain-en-Laye west of Paris, whose market gardens were long associated with peas — the vegetable that became a court craze under Louis XIV. In the grammar of nineteenth-century kitchens, a named base soup was often not served alone: it was garnished, and a garnish would frequently earn the dish a new name on the menu, so the same purée turns up variously with croutons, with rice, with shredded lettuce, or as here with vermicelli. That is why this entry reads as a fragment rather than a full recipe — it belongs to a system in which the cook was expected to know the mother preparation by heart and needed only to be told the finish.