Adventures In Sublime Soup

I mentioned in a previous blog post about the beauty of legumes that I have an absolutely sublime split pea soup recipe.  But the reason I seldom make it is that this particular recipe requires a very meaty ham bone.  Not smoked ham hocks that you can get from your butcher, or cubed up ham, but a real ham bone with lots of meat and fat still on it, and presumably with some marrow still in the bone.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I only have access to a ham bone like that about once a year.  (Okay, I could have access more often, but that would require that I cook a ham myself, which is simply not happening.) This year, my favorite sister-in-law cooked a spiral-cut ham for the family for Christmas dinner.  And then she carefully left a generous amount of meat on the bone for me and wrapped it up in foil for me to carry home.  I made my fabulous soup a couple days later.

The recipe is so simple.  Even more simple than my regular split pea soup recipe.  I cook mine in a crock pot, but you could do it on the stove in a soup pot.  The point is to cook it low and slow.  There are four ingredients:  a pound of split peas, a big onion all chopped up, the ham bone, and water.  That’s it.

I started by dumping my split peas into the crock pot and then picking through them to take out all the mystery bits that I didn’t want in my soup (mostly fragments of the outer casing of the peas).

Next, I added the ham bone, which was so big that it barely fit.  Then I coarsely chopped up two onions (I didn’t have any big ones, so I used two small ones) and dumped those in, followed by enough water to cover the ham bone.  In this case, I think I had to use about nine cups of water.

That’s it.  No seasonings.  The ham bone is quite salty and usually imparts almost all of the needed salt to the soup, and more can be added when it’s served, if necessary.  I turned the crock pot on low, covered it, and let it do its thing for about eight hours. After eight hours, I took out the ham bone, cut off the meat, and chopped it into smallish pieces before stirring them back into the soup. 

Then I took the ceramic insert out of the crock pot and put it in the fridge, uncovered.  And left it overnight.  This lets all the excess fat come to the surface and harden up.  The next day, I took it out of the fridge, and used a spoon to scrape off and discard that layer of fat.  Underneath the fat was a layer that looked like gelatin, so I had to stir everything up, since the split peas were underneath.

Warm up a big bowlful in the microwave, taste it, add any salt required, and hey, presto! An amazing dinner for really very little effort.  I ended up with about eight meal-sized portions of soup, most of which I froze for later.  I did take a bowl of it to my favorite sister-in-law.  It seemed only fair, since I’d been rhapsodizing about how amazing the soup is and since she had contributed the critical ingredient…

Normally, I’d supply a recipe for this, but it’s so simple (and a little variable, depending on the size of your ham bone and how much water you have to add) that I thought I’d just summarize, so here goes:

Method for sublime soup:

1 lb split peas, picked over

1 large onion, coarsely chopped

1 large and meaty ham bone (think leftover-from-Easter-dinner size)

Enough water to cover the ham bone

Cook in a crockpot on low for eight hours.  Remove the ham bone, take off the meat, and return the meat to the soup.  Refrigerate for long enough for the fat to harden on the surface, then skim it off.  Stir it up, heat it up, and enjoy.