Sweet Pea Soup with Pickled Radish

As a child, peas were my worst enemy.

I more than disliked them. I dreaded them, and I’m not exactly sure why. Possibly because they were frozen and did not taste like much of anything to me. Or, maybe because the texture simply just did not appeal to me. Whatever the reason, I remember sitting with my dinner plate, for what seemed like hours, nibbling bites of food and clearly ignoring the peas. I tried moving them around, disguising them with pieces of meat, sticking them into little mounds of mashed potatoes. It was horrible. They always came back, to no avail. My last resort of actually placing them, pea by pea, around the underside of my plate never worked either.

I’m not sure exactly when the tables turned, but somewhere along the line, I started to dread them less and less, but I still was not delighted by their presence on my plate. I didn’t request peas for meals, but my fussiness magically faded, and I ate them scattered in pasta and rice dishes, with no hard feelings or bitter thoughts. And, eventually I made peace with peas.

Our next door neighbor at the time, a lady named Mae, used to make huge batches of a sweet and creamy pea soup. Sometimes, I would watch her shell the peas in her backyard, and often, I would lend a helping hand between rollerskating sets. I was just as enthralled with pea shelling as I was with getting a smooth breezy ride down the hill. The enormous bowls full of freshly shelled peas somehow made their way into a stockpot and into Mae’s Creamy Pea Soup.

The soup I’ve chosen here, is a little different from Mae’s Creamy Pea Soup, however, some of the elements are similar. I’ve chosen a recipe by Domenica Marchetti from her book, The Glorious Soups and Stews of Italy. I’ve found a version of it posted online here. Domenica’s recipe is extremely light, flavorful from the fresh marjoram and thyme, and delicate in texture, much like Mae’s.

The big difference is the dairy. Mae’s soup contained a large amount of heavy cream, while Domenica’s recipe calls for an optional small amount of cream stirred in at the very end. I replaced this optional amount of cream with almond milk instead, which makes it dairy-free. And, if you use vegetable broth in place of the chicken broth as I did, you will also have a vegetarian soup. Even with my minor adjustments, the soup tasted incredibly sweet and velvety. The pickled radish and cucumber garnish adds the just the right amount of crunch, texture, and gives the soup fantastic color.

Sweet Pea Soup with Pickled Radish

Inspired by Mae and adapted from here.

Tagged as: cucumber, dairy free, english peas, garden peas, light soup, marjoram, pickled radish, radish, shell peas, spring onion, spring soup, sweet pea soup, sweet peas, thyme, vegan, Vegetarian