An Excellent Green Peas Soup

History

An Excellent Green Peas Soup takes three pints of fine large peas at their fullest size, but before they have gone off colour or been got at by worms. They are boiled as for table with half a teaspoonful of carbonate of soda in the water, which the receipt explains is there so that they may be very green. Drained, they go into a couple of quarts of boiling beef or veal stock — pale, but good — and stew gently for half an hour before the whole is worked through a fine hair sieve, brought back to the point of boiling, and finished with salt and a small teaspoonful of pounded sugar.

Two things in that method are worth noticing. The soup is built on a clear meat stock rather than on water or on the peas' own liquor, which is what gives it body without a roux. And the soda is a colour trick, added at the boiling stage and not at the end — a cook's answer to the way green vegetables go grey in a long pot.

An earlier version of this note traced the dish through medieval and Renaissance French potages and the rise of a velouté technique in Enlightenment haute cuisine. Those accounts we learned from popular reference and food-writing sources, and we were unable to locate the evidence they rest on.

Ingredients

• 3 pints fine large green peas
• 1/2 teaspoonful carbonate of soda
• 2 quarts beef or veal stock
• 1 small teaspoonful pounded sugar
• salt

Instructions

1. Select peas at their fullest size but before they become discoloured or worm-eaten.
2. Boil the peas with half a teaspoonful of carbonate of soda in the water to keep them very green, until quite tender (25 to 30 minutes or more).
3. Drain the peas well.
4. Put the drained peas into a couple of quarts of boiling pale but good beef or veal stock.
5. Stew them gently in the stock for half an hour.
6. Work the whole through a fine hair-sieve into a clean pan.
7. Bring it to the point of boiling.
8. Add salt if needed and a small teaspoonful of pounded sugar.
9. Clear off the scum entirely.
10. Serve the soup as hot as possible.
11. For an elegant variety, add a half pint more of stock to the peas and about three quarters of a pint of asparagus points that have been boiled apart and well drained.
12. Add the asparagus only the instant before the soup is sent to the table.