A watercolour of a thick pale green pea soup with pink flecks of ham and coarse black pepper
Generated with OpenAI gpt-image-1
Adapted from London particular

Ham and pea soup

An established dish converted to shelf-stable ingredients. Every substitution is documented below.

How long it keeps

About 6 months, set by Ham (tinned).

Indicative, for planning a build before you buy. The answer for a pack you already own is the best before date printed on it, and that only holds if it has been stored as the label says.

Serves
4
Burners
1
Pans
1
Water
0.8 L
Active
10 min
Total
25 min

Ingredients

Thick, salty, faintly sweet and done in under half an hour, which is not something the original can claim.

Do not add salt. Between the ham, the pea liquor and the stock cube this is already at the edge, and there is no way back once it is in. Taste at the end and reach for the vinegar instead.

  1. Oil and dried onion in the pan, three minutes, until it smells sweet.
  2. Peas in with their liquid, plus about 500 ml of water and the crumbled stock cube. Simmer 10 minutes, crushing about half of them against the side of the pan with a spoon. That is what makes it a soup rather than peas in water.
  3. Ham cubed small and stirred through for the last three minutes. It is already cooked and it goes stringy if you boil it hard.
  4. Off the heat, the vinegar and a great deal of pepper.

The vinegar is not optional and it goes in at the end. Pea soup without acid is heavy and tastes only of salt. A teaspoon lifts the whole pan.

Serves 4.

What this was adapted from

London particular: the English split pea and ham soup built on a ham hock and its cooking liquor

  • a ham hock simmered for hours → tinned ham, and the salt it brings

    The hock is doing two jobs, meat and stock, and a tin only does the first. Most of the savoury depth has to come from elsewhere, which is what the stock cube and a long pepper are for. It is a lighter soup and does not pretend to be the original.

  • dried split peas soaked and simmered → tinned marrowfat peas

    Marrowfats are already soft and already floury, so they collapse into the soup in ten minutes rather than ninety. They are sweeter than split peas and the soup is greener for it.