Split Pea Soup
1 cup dried split peas. 3 quarts cold water. 1/2 onion. 1/8 teaspoon pepper. 4-inch cube salt fat pork 1 ham bone 2 tablespoons fat teaspoon pepper onion 2 tablespoons flour 1½ teaspoons salt Pick over peas and soak overnight; drain; add cold water, pork, ham bone and onion. Simmer 3 or 4 hours, or until peas are soft. Rub through a sieve. Add the flour mixed with fat to soup. Boil 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Add seasonings. Thin with milk if necessary.
A standard boarding-house and household split pea soup, printed with the compressed two-column ingredient list that early twentieth-century booklets favored. The list has run together in this printing, and one key quantity is missing.
- The missing quantitiesNo amount of peas or water is given in the text as printed, and the onion has no number attached to it. Standard practice in books of this era is 1 pint (about 1 lb) of dried split peas to 2 quarts of cold water, with one onion; treat that as a reconstruction rather than the author's own figure.
- Salt fat porkA four-inch cube of salt pork is a substantial piece — by volume something on the order of a pound or two rather than a half-pound. It is cured, not fresh, and rinsing it before it goes in keeps the finished soup from being oversalted, especially alongside a ham bone.
- The ham boneThis is the whole point of the recipe: a leftover bone with some meat clinging to it. A smoked ham hock is the closest thing most butchers now carry, and one is enough. Without it the soup tastes flat, since the peas themselves contribute little but body.
- SoakingModern split peas are cleaner and often need no overnight soak; they break down in 45 to 90 minutes of simmering. The three-to-four-hour time here likely reflects older, drier stock and a pot left to simmer largely unattended.
- Rubbing through a sieveA food mill or immersion blender does this in a minute. Fish out the bone and the pork first, and return any shredded meat to the pot afterward if you want it.
- The flour and fatThis is a roux stirred into the finished soup rather than cooked at the start. Two tablespoons of each will thicken about two quarts noticeably; if the sieved peas have already given you the consistency you want, skip it, or the soup turns pasty on standing.
- The boilingFive minutes of hard boiling with constant stirring is there to cook the raw flour taste out. Peas scorch readily on a modern flat-bottomed pan over direct heat, so keep the spoon moving and the flame moderate.
- YieldMade to the proportions above, roughly two quarts — six to eight servings. It thickens considerably overnight; the milk mentioned at the end is meant for reheating as much as for the first pot.
Split pea soup earns its place in a book like this on economics: dried peas were among the cheapest sources of protein in an American pantry, and the recipe is built around a bone that would otherwise be thrown out. The pattern — legume, cured pork, one onion, long slow simmer — is older than the country and shows up in English pease pottage, Dutch erwtensoep, and French-Canadian soupe aux pois, all of which arrived in North America with their respective settlers. Insurance companies were known to distribute cook books of this kind free to policyholders in the early decades of the twentieth century, part of a broader campaign linking domestic thrift and nutrition to public health; the recipes here are correspondingly plain, cheap, and written on the assumption that a ham bone would be at hand.