gloria p > wrote:

<snip>

> I make mine the same way as Dave but I use a ham bone instead of the
> smoked hock. I've tried the hock and we decided it was too strong
> (salty? smoky? I don't remember.) Perhaps it's just not what we
> were used to thinking of as pea soup flavor.

There are a lot of variations on this theme. We make a couple of
varieties of pea soup, depending on what we have in the kitchen and what
we feel like eating. We're actually more likely to do this by the
wife's family recipe or an Amish recipe. This one is good when you want
something a little sweeter.

> The croutons sound like
> a good addition, but not the turnip, sugar or milk.

A matter of taste. You don't usually wind up adding that much milk.
The sugar isn't really that much (1 Tbsp in 3 quarts), so it sweetens
just a bit.

In my experience, people don't use much in the way of turnips these
days. That's a bit limiting factor for us. We can't use this recipe if
we can't get the ingredients. In that case, we'll do a different split
pea soup recipe.

> I've never had to thicken pea soup. Perhaps soaking the peas does
> something to lessen their starch or thickening ability?

Three quarts of water is a bit much for 2 cups of split peas.

An odd point about that pint/2 cups of split peas measurement. Most
folks these days buy their dried peas in a bag which is marked by weight
and not volume. We tend to buy a lot of our dried goods at an Amish
bulk store and then store them in airtight containers. We keep our
kitchen scale set for metric (for those German recipes), so it's just
more convenient for us to stick with the older measurements which are
found in the recipes. So, we rarely convert the old volume measurements
to weight measurments and I'm likely to go the other way.

Now, I mentioned ounces when measuring the flour. This is really more
of a "toss some into a cup and mix some milk in". How much to use is a
judgement call.


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