Split Pea Soup

Method

1. sweat8 min
   medium, lid ajar
   butter + onion + carrot + celery until the onion is translucent and slack but uncolored — browning here would push the soup toward roast-vegetable sweetness, and this soup wants the smoke to lead
2. saute1 min
   medium
   + garlic, just to the point of fragrance; garlic held longer against a dry pan bottom turns bitter and that bitterness survives ninety minutes of simmering
3. simmer75 min
   bare simmer, lid on, stirring every 15 min
   + split peas + water + ham hock + bay leaf + thyme. Keep it at a lazy simmer, not a boil: peas release starch as they collapse, the starch settles, and a hard boil welds that layer to the pot floor and scorches the whole batch. Add no vinegar, tomato, or wine yet — acid firms pea cell walls and peas that meet it early will still be gritty at hour three
4. cook10 min
   off heat
   pull the hock out, strip the meat from bone and skin, shred it, and return it to the pot; discard bay leaf and thyme stems, which have given up everything they had
5. mash3 min
   in the pot
   press about a third of the peas against the side of the pot with a spoon or masher and stir them back in. This thickens the soup with its own starch and leaves the rest of the peas as body — a blender would make it uniformly smooth and oddly gluey, since pea starch over-worked goes pasty
6. season2 min
   low, thinning as needed
   + salt + black pepper, and now the optional splash of cider vinegar — added at the end it reads as brightness against the smoked pork rather than blocking the peas from softening. Loosen with hot water to a pourable spoon-coating consistency; the soup sets noticeably thicker as it cools and will be paste by tomorrow