Winter time demands a soup so thick you can stand a wooden spoon upright in the centre of the pot. It demands that you use old-fashioned recipes that your mother used to feed you. It demands a soup that puts hairs on your chest, a gleam in your eye and allows you to punch your own personal hole in the ozone layer.
Yes, I’m talking about pea soup.
Take two smoked ham hocks or a kilo of bacon bones or kaiserflech or similar smokey porcine goodness and put this into your largest soup-pot with about 5 litres of water. While this is coming to the boil, throw in three diced onions, a half-dozen diced carrots, half a bunch of celery (also diced), a half-dozen peeled and roughly cubed potatoes and about a kilo of green split peas. DO NOT ADD SALT. Generally the meat will have enough salt.
Bring this to a rolling simmer and stir from time to time so the peas do not stick to the bottom. If you have a gas stove, a simmer mat might be useful at this point.
Let this concoction boil until the peas have turned to mush, the vegetables are extremely soft and the meat is coming off the hocks. Take out the hocks, strip off the fat and skin, take off the meat and cut it into chunks and return it to the soup.
Dice up a smoked sausage (rookwurst or similar) and put into the soup about 10 minutes before you want to serve it and check salt content. Add any salt or flavours you feel might be needed.
Ladle (or pry) the soup into bowls and serve with a huge winter appetite.
