The Time Capsule: The origins of the hearty Pease Porridge

Pease Porridge Hot/Pease Porridge Cold/Pease Porridge in the Pot/Nine Days Old.

We truly live in strange times—the internet offers access to every recipe known to man, culinary magazines are solid sellers, virtually anyone with an accent and a spatula can get a show on the cable Food Network--even I managed to get a cookbook published—yet winter is upon us and who out there knows how to make a hearty pot of Pease Porridge?  
We can’t give you the original recipe, but this week we’re going to offer one account of how this rib-sticker originated.  
According to a publication called the Clans of Scotland Newsletter, Volume 19, Number 5, Angus MacPease was a late 1800’s era farmer and entrepreneur from Aberdeen, Scotland.  In his time it was customary for small grains to be sold to consumers by the barrel.  Due to insects, mold, and the time it took a family to use an entire barrel, there was considerable waste.  MacPease had a marketing idea, and put his wife and children to work packaging grain and selling it in small bags.  The family business evolved.  Eventually Dolly MacPease began using surplus oats to make and sell a cooked porridge mixture.  

Angus bought and marketed various grains.  One year he acquired, at a bargain price, hundreds of pounds of dried peas.  The peas didn’t sell, so his wife came up with a recipe that was basically peas, rolled oats, water and a bit of seasoning.  The concoction could be consumed hot as a thick soup or cooked down and cooled to be sliced and fried as mush.  Some people, so the story goes, would push the pot to the back of the stove, perhaps add a little more water or a soup bone, then leave it set for a few days on the outside chance the stuff would become edible.  

One of the MacPease sons, according to the Clans of Scotland Newsletter, dubbed the mixture “Pease Porridge” and is credited with writing the jingle, doing so in the hope the verse would help sell soup.  The hand-clapping and knee-slapping, we are told, came along later.  

MacPease went broke selling grain and porridge and moved his family to the United States.  He was struggling to make a living in this country when he met a fellow Scotsman named Ian Campbell.  Campbell had learned the art of canning vegetables and developed his own specialty; soup.  MacPease approached Campbell about marketing his “Pease Porridge,” and Campbell agreed to give it a taste test.  Campbell was not at all impressed.  However, perhaps as a favor to his fellow countryman, he made an offer.  Leave out the lumpy oatmeal, he told MacPease, and he’d try selling pea soup.  Campbell’s pea soup became a solid seller and the MacPease clan lived happily ever after.    

That’s the story according to the Clans of Scotland Newsletter, and a good one it is.  Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be true.  An on-line history of the Campbell’s Soup Company tells us the founder and only Campbell involved in ownership was Joseph Campbell.  No mention is made either of Ian Campbell or Angus MacPease, and the company didn’t start marketing soup until after Campbell sold out.  

So who knows?  Maybe the verse actually was written by Mother Goose. Regardless, it’s amazing what soup can do.                         

Roy Marshall is a local historian and columnist for the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoakexpress.com.

The Red Oak Express

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