Name: Chilled Green Pea and Borage Soup
Ingredients: salt; whole-milk yogurt; borage flowers; pepper; frozen petite peas; fresh borage stalks; sugar; leek; scallion; extra virgin olive oil

Paula Wolfert

Chilled Green Pea and Borage Soup

Preparation info

Difficulty
Medium
Serves
4 to 6

Appears in

The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen

By Paula Wolfert

Published 2003

About

This refreshing, moss-green soup from western Turkey, called bezelye corbast, combines tiny peas with cooling borage leaves and stalks, which taste like cucumber. Its peerless flavor is due to small young peas. Old peas, with too much starch, won’t yield as fine a result. In Turkey, the soup is generally served warm, but I prefer it chilled.

Think of this soup as a “basic black dress” you can gussy up with some whipped cream, or garnish by scattering some blue borage flowers on top, or simply enhance with a swirl of olive oil or pistachio oil blended with very young borage leaves.

Ingredients

4 cups whole-milk yogurt
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
¼ cup finely chopped young leek (white part only) or scallion
1½ cups chopped fresh borage stalks and young leaves (see Note)
1 package (10 ounces) first-quality frozen petite peas
Pinches of sugar
Salt and freshly ground pepper
Borage flowers, for garnish

Method

Make the soup early in the day or the day before. Drain the yogurt in a paper towel-lined colander set over a bowl for 3 to 4 hours.
Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a deep saucepan. When it’s hot, add the leek, cover, reduce the heat to low, and cook gently for 4 to 5 minutes. Add the borage stalks and leaves and cook, stirring, for 2 minutes. Add 2 cups water and bring to a boil. Simmer for 10 minutes.
Add the peas and cook for 5 more minutes. Remove from the heat and add the sugar and salt and pepper. Let cool, then whirl in an electric blender or food processor with 1 cup water until smooth. Strain through a sieve into a bowl, cover, and store in the refrigerator.
Place 2 cups of the drained yogurt in a wide bowl; gradually whisk in the pea soup. Thin with ice water to the desired consistency. Correct the seasoning. Serve garnished with any remaining yogurt and borage flowers.

Stale Bread for Soup

Around the Mediterranean, stale bread is nearly as important an ingredient as fresh bread. Entire books have been written on what to do with it. Many of the most famous Mediterranean soups are thickened with it: the Spanish summer and winter gazpacho; French panade; Italian ribollita; Middle Eastern fatta; Israeli matzo ball soup; and Moroccan Berber reflssa, consisting of dried bread simmered in an onion broth.

The combination of onion and bread is inevitable. Think of French onion soup gratinée. In Istanbul there are bakeries that sell a special bagel-shaped bread called simit, which is soaked in broth, then cooked very slowly, then served with sautéed onions on top. In the Turkish town of Sivas, toasted bread is smothered in a combination of pickled Swiss chard leaves and simmered onions.

Ancient Turks had a word for stale bread dipped in hot gravy—they called it tint. The word actually has two meanings: a meal made with toasted bread soaked in broth or milk, and also an old and weak person.

There is an old Turkish saying: “I dipped my bread in the tirit broth, which I paid for. Don’t ever think I got it for free!”

This means that stale bread, though inexpensive, is still something one has to pay for. In other words, stale bread has value.

“In Greece today, wood is expensive, and we need a lot of it to heat the bread ovens,” my friend, Greek cookbook author Aglaia Kremezi, tells me. “Often, to save fuel, a home cook will have quite a few loaves of bread baking at the same time. Of course, some of the bread gets stale before it’s eaten, so we have a whole category of dishes in which stale bread is soaked in a sauce or broth, then eaten like a pudding or custard.”

Preparation info

Difficulty

Serves

Appears in

Ingredients

Method