Split Pea Soup

It's a kind of miserable day here in Oregon just five days before Thanksgiving, a drippy, bone-chilling kind of day. It's not terribly cold, in the low 40s, but we are socked in by a fog that makes it gray and raw. It's a day on which I just cannot seem to get warm. In short, it's a perfect soup day. Good thing I have split pea soup on the menu for this evening.

Split Pea Soup in the Slow Cooker

Split pea soup is comfort food to a lot of the world. You'll find beloved versions by various names all over the northern hemisphere in the North America, Scandinavia, Europe, Russia, and probably a great more places as well. Its popularity no doubt stems from being cheap, delicious, and almost trivial to prepare.

Split pea soup is a very old dish, an ancient peasant food, well documented by Romans. If you think about the northern British dish pease porridge or pease pudding, the word pease dates back to Middle English, to the 15th or 16th century. As an aside, the word pea is a false singular back derived from the word pease, which was a mass noun with no singular. The dish is probably in our DNA now, being far, far older than that: read more here.

Pease porridge, a thick purée of yellow split peas cooked with ham (or salt pork), is clearly the progenitor of our American split pea and ham soup, a much thinner version made with green split peas. My version for a quick dinner is made without any meat at all. For company, I might include a ham hock and/or some country ham in the soup.

Moreover, no longer living in the country ham capital of the US (Virginia), I wouldn't even know where to find a good ham bone out here in Oregon. We always saved the bones from our Thanksgiving and Christmas hams with which to make a great pot or two of split pea soup. And in the days when we used to boil our country hams to cook them, we would save the ham stock to make split pea soup. But these days when Ann and I are eating meat only sporadically, we go without.

Although I love the soup now, it was not love at first sight. You must admit that the drab green lumpy soup is at first glance pretty off-putting. And off-putting I thought it in about 1970 when my mother first made the soup (she may have made it prior, but I had no memory of eating it prior). I would eat anything (and I still will) to the point where my siblings called me the human vacuum cleaner. But balk I did at olive green soup.

My mom did try every trick in her book to get me to taste it, for the entirety of an afternoon after school. In the end I relented, though I am not sure what persuaded me to try it other than simple hunger, and split peas have taken their rightful place on my list of favorite soups.

Split Pea Soup Recipe

As for a recipe, it is soup. That means nobody cares about exact amounts or an exact list of ingredients. This version was two pounds of green split peas, two medium onions, two large carrots, two stalks of celery, six cloves of garlic (minced), a bunch of silver thyme from out front (leaves plucked), two bay leaves, a couple teaspoons of Kosher salt, a big pinch of black pepper, and a gallon or so of water. In the crockpot on high for four hours and voilà!

For me, I crave the flavor of thyme in my split pea soup. It is missing something if I don't pick up a background hint of thyme. And so I always go out to the garden and bring some in for my batch of soup. I have many thyme plants in the yard, but my favorite with the best flavor is a variegated thyme called silver thyme.