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Split Pea Soup with Meat
Pick over and wash one quart of split peas, put into a large bowl with several quarts of cold water and let soak over night. Drain, add four quarts of fresh cold water, one-half pound of streaky bacon from which the rind has been removed, two pounds of lean beef (from the neck or end of round), two onions (small) each stuck with two cloves, and a bouquet made of three sprigs of parsley, two sprigs of thyme and half of a bay leaf. Simmer gently, adding half of a cupful of cold water from time to time to check the cooking, until the peas begin to disintegrate, then add one-half of a teaspoonful of sugar, salt and pepper to taste, and cook an hour longer. Remove the meat and bacon to a platter, press the peas through a sieve, return to the fire and slightly thicken with one tablespoonful of flour rubbed to a thin paste with cold water. Simmer for ten minutes longer and the soup is ready to serve.
A full-sized nineteenth-century soup that doubles as a boiled-meat dinner: the peas become the soup, the beef and bacon come out whole and are eaten separately. Plan for a large pot and about three hours.
- Scale and yieldOne quart of split peas is roughly 2 lb, and four quarts of water is a gallon. You will want a pot of at least 8 quarts; the soup should give something like 10 to 12 servings, plus the boiled beef and bacon as a second dish.
- The overnight soakModern split peas are cleaned and dried to a standard that makes soaking unnecessary; they break down in 60 to 90 minutes of simmering. Soaking still shortens the cooking a little and does no harm, but skipping it will not ruin the soup.
- Streaky baconThis means slab bacon or the whole side, rind removed, not thin breakfast slices. A piece of unsliced smoked slab bacon is the closest match; unsmoked pancetta will work but gives a different flavour. Buy it in one piece so it can be lifted out intact.
- The beef cutNeck and the end of the round are lean, sinewy, cheap braising cuts. Beef shin, chuck or brisket behave the same way over three hours; a modern top round roast will go dry and stringy.
- Adding cold water to check the cookingPea puree will catch and scorch on the bottom if it boils hard, and the splash of cold water knocks the pot back down to a bare simmer. Stir the bottom often and keep the heat low.
- Salt at the endThe bacon salts the pot as it cooks. Season only after the peas have broken down, as the recipe directs, or the finished soup will be over-salted once it has reduced.
- SievingPressing through a sieve (or a tamis or food mill) was the usual way to get a smooth puree. A stick blender in the pot does it in under a minute; pass it through a sieve afterwards only if you want the very fine texture the original assumes.
- The flour thickeningOne tablespoon of flour in four quarts is close to negligible and mostly there for gloss. If the puréed soup is already the consistency you want, leave it out; if you use it, whisk the paste in off the boil and give it the full ten minutes to lose its raw taste.
- The meatThe beef and bacon are not garnish. Serve them sliced on the platter with mustard, pickles and potatoes, either alongside the soup or as the course after it.
Split pea soup with a piece of salt pork or bacon and a lump of beef is one of the oldest patterns in European cooking: dried peas kept through the winter, and the meat that flavoured the pot was too valuable to be left in it as scraps, so it came out whole for the table. The technique here reads as French in its details rather than English: the bouquet of parsley, thyme and bay, the final sieving and light liaison of flour suggest standard potage practice of the sort often said to have been taught in professional kitchens whose methods American cookbook writers are generally thought to have been borrowing around 1900. The single half-teaspoon of sugar looks like a small period signature: cooks of the era are often said to have added it to dried-legume soups to round out the flat, chalky note that long-stored peas develop, a habit that survives in some Dutch and German recipes still.