Commentary: Potage St. Germain – Fresh Pea Soup

This soup is named after a suburb of Paris and recipes for this soup can be found all over, on the net and in cookbooks. Each is slightly different.

When I was growing up my Mother and I would go to a wonderful restaurant called the Magic Pan. They served crepes, salad and a most wonderful soup called Potage St. Germain.

The Magic Pan was a chain, but nonetheless the food was spectacular. They closed all the restaurants suddenly on one day… and gone were the terrific crepes and that soup I absolutely loved. This began my quest to find out how to make this wonderful soup.

I do remember being told by one of the staff that the secret to the pea soup was that it was made with chicken stock instead of the usual ham. I remember, not sure this is correct or not, that it did not have ham in it at all. To date, I have only found one recipe that doesn’t use ham, but it uses water instead of chicken stock… so there began my experimentation.

I have since searched the net and found several places where former employees have listed some of the Magic Pan recipes. I only found one source that claims to have the recipe… which sadly, in my opinion is not quite correct. Another source that is probably correct said that the soup was made up of two commercially made soups mixed… more than likely he is correct.

The up-side of this quest has been that I have found several terrific recipes for pea soup, including a typically American version. So I will share them with you.