Chickpea Cream Soup with Garlic-Lard Bread
A traditional Bulgarian recipe from chef Shishkov. This recipe is rather characteristic of modern cooking because of the puréeing technique, but it combines two very old crops used in our lands since deep antiquity — peas and chickpeas. Our great-grandmothers already used this 'trick' of thickening and homogenizing legume grains to give different flavour and texture to certain dishes (see the note on p. 78).
Ingredients
| 250 g | cooked chickpeas | |
| 400 ml | vegetable stock | |
| 200 ml | milk | |
| 150 g | peas | |
| 30 g | butter | |
| 1 tbsp | 15 ml | pork lard |
| 4 | slices of bread | |
| a few | garlic cloves | |
| — | salt and black pepper |
Instructions
- Bring the cooked chickpeas to the boil in the vegetable stock and add the fresh milk. Purée it into a homogeneous mixture.
- Add the butter and season with salt and black pepper. Add the peas and return the soup to the heat to boil. If using canned peas, 1–2 minutes are enough for them to be done. If frozen or fresh, they must first be boiled and then added to the cream soup.
- Grate the garlic cloves finely on a grater, mix them with the lard, add salt and pepper and spread over the bread slices. Toast them in the oven under the top element for 5–10 minutes.
Makes 4 servings. Time: 30 min. Difficulty: 2/5.