Green Pea Soup
Cover one quart green peas with hot water and boil with one small onion, until they will mash easily, the time will depend on the age of the peas, wash and add one pint of stock; cook together two tablespoonfuls butter and one of flour until smooth, but not brown; add to the peas and then add one cup cream and one of milk; season with salt and pepper, and let boil up once; strain and serve. One cup of whipped cream added the last moment is an improvement.
A straightforward purée soup, though the printed text has one garbled word and no yield. Worth reading the order of operations carefully before you start.
- "wash and add one pint of stock"Almost certainly a typesetter's error for mash — the peas have just been boiled until they mash easily. Mash or press them, then add the stock.
- A quart of green peasShelled peas, measured by volume: roughly 1¼ lb, which means somewhere around 2½ to 3 lb of peas in the pod. Frozen peas work and need only a few minutes; the book gives no time, only that it depends on the age of the peas.
- The rouxButter and flour "until smooth, but not brown" is a white roux, 2 minutes over low heat. Whisk a ladle of the hot pea liquid into it before adding it to the pot, or it will sit in lumps.
- Strain last, not firstThe recipe strains after the dairy goes in. A food mill or blender before straining will get you far more purée through the sieve than pressing alone.
- "Let boil up once"Bring it just to the point of breaking into a boil and pull it off. Held at a boil after the cream and milk go in, the soup will catch on the bottom and can separate.
- ColourLong boiling turns fresh peas from bright green to olive. If you want the colour, cook the peas briskly and uncovered and get them into the purée quickly.
- The whipped creamUnsweetened, whipped to soft peaks, and added at the very last moment as the recipe directs; it will collapse quickly in hot soup, so some cooks prefer to spoon it onto each bowl.
- YieldAbout 1½ quarts finished, or four to six first-course servings.
Green pea soup of this kind — peas cooked soft, sieved, then enriched with a butter-and-flour binding and cream — is the Anglo-American domestic counterpart of the French purée Saint-Germain, and versions of it are common in English-language household manuals of the later nineteenth century. Before commercial freezing, fresh green peas were a short late-spring and early-summer vegetable. The finishing spoonful of whipped cream is a period touch found in other soups of the era, and the butter-flour-cream framework was a standard way of giving body to a vegetable soup.