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.

Pease Porridge

Depending on who you ask, we've been on borrowed time for anywhere from three days to two weeks. Our luck ran out overnight on Saturday: our first frost of the year followed by a 28F freeze the following evening. Earlier in the week in preparation for the coming cold weather, I picked all the basil and made pesto and Ann asked if I would make a pot of split pea soup on Sunday to accompany the chilly weather and a loaf of her delicious bread.

I've never really considered split pea soup and by considered, I mean in an academic nature. [Cue groaning noises from my wife.] Been making it all my adult life, but I never considered from which culinary tradition it has come. I didn't know anything about the history of the dish.

I certainly did have a guess that since we have a nursery rhyme about the dish ("pease porridge hot/pease porridge cold/...") that the dish is very old. And that it is, the rhyme is first recorded in the early 18th century but the dish is mentioned by Aristophanes and that was nearly 2500 years ago. Split pea soup is downright ancient on a human timescale. Further reading leads me to believe that cooked dried peas and pork is common to most of northern Europe; it certainly is extremely common in many militaries and all throughout Scandinavia. That it appears across such a broad swath of the world tells us that this dish is so old that it predates our modern notion of cuisines and international boundaries.

And its antiquity probably explains why we love it so: at this point, love for the soup is probably recorded at some level in our DNA. All joking aside, it is one of the few dishes that I, the ultimate omnivore, came to kicking and screaming. When I was a youngster of about 8 or 9, my mother made for the first time in my reckoning a nasty looking green soup which she assured me was delicious. I've never really balked at foods, but I bet it took her a solid half an hour of cajoling me while she was cooking it to get me to try that damn green stuff. I guess the color put me off. But once I finally nerved up enough to taste it, I was hooked.

[The only other thing that I came to balkily was sushi. At 25 years of age, I had never seen raw fish before. These were the days before you could buy sushi in any town anywhere. Four or five beers it took to get into the raw fish, but after that, I was likewise hooked.]

My split pea soup is always made with green split peas, a ham hock, an onion, a couple of carrots, some garlic, a bay leaf, and some thyme. Except this batch.

Not My Usual Split Pea Soup Mise

I was fresh out of carrots, so I grabbed a sweet potato for color. That's the only reason carrot is in the soup: for contrasting color. And I grabbed a few small pork sausages because I don't have a ham in the fridge and I didn't feel like getting one out of the back and unwrapping it. The secret weapon in my soup is what we call "pork goodness," the juices that congeal in the bottom of the pan after we have roasted our pork belly. I added about a pint of that at the very end. Because it is so salty, I add it at the end instead of salt.

Ann's roasted garlic loaf was incredibly delicious. Alas the photos did not turn out. The short day did not afford enough daylight and the picture quality was awful. Pictures or no, the soup and bread in front of the fire was a great way to temporarily chase away our first taste of winter.

Putting By

I might as well face it: I don't know how to cook for less than an army. I think it's the curse of chefs the world around. We're so used to cooking in gigantic batches that huge is our average. It's so bad sometimes that I get to chuckling at all the "cute" little containers of condiments in our cabinets at home. Doesn't everyone buy vinegar in 5-litre containers? ;)

So I might as well channel this curse into something useful: making large batches of food that we can freeze against the future day when we just don't feel like or don't have time to cook. This weekend, at Ann's urging, I made a vast pot of pork ragù and our supersized crockpot full of split pea soup. We now have, for very little effort, many meals of both tucked away for future use.



Yes, This is an Entire Hotel Pan Full of Pork Shoulder

Basic meat sauce procedure: Cube the meat; brown it; remove from pan. Add mirepoix, garlic, and bouquet garni of herbs; cook until onions are translucent. Deglaze with white wine (I used leftover going flat Crémant de Bourgogne). Add tomato purée and a bit of heavy cream. Cook (for hours on low flame) until meat starts to fall apart; stir to shred meat. Cook until desired thickness.



Split Pea Soup with Ham

Basic split pea soup procedure: dump mirepoix, minced garlic, bouquet garni, ham scraps, and split peas into a crockpot. Add water. Turn it on and forget it. Come back some hours later. Season to taste. Nothing could be simpler!

Ann's Gorgeous Olive Loaf

Annie was back at it this weekend, tempting me with more of her awesome bread! This is an olive loaf that she made to accompany the meat sauce and pasta that you see below. Everyone should eat this damn well! Sadly, few people see the investment in time in the kitchen as worth it.



Worth the Wait!