Pantry Staples

Split Peas (Dry)

Split peas are a pulse — the dried, split seed of the pea plant — placing them in the same broad food category as lentils and dried beans, even though a fresh garden pea is eaten as a vegetable rather than dried down for storage.

Canada has grown into one of the world's largest producers and exporters of split peas, a major pulse-crop industry built up substantially over the past several decades alongside the country's lentil trade.

Split peas carry a fairly mild base flavor on their own, which is part of why so many classic preparations lean on assertive aromatics — a bay leaf, a smoked ham hock, sautéed onion and carrot — to build most of a finished pot's character.

Split peas are the mature, dried seed of a field-pea type bred to dry down fully on the vine, then mechanically hulled and split — a genuinely different crop and processing path from the fresh, sweet garden pea eaten straight from the pod.

Pease pudding, a traditional English dish of boiled split peas mashed with butter and traditionally served alongside boiled ham or bacon, dates back centuries and gave rise to the old nursery rhyme about "pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold."

Erwtensoep, or snert, a thick Dutch pea soup loaded with smoked sausage and bacon, is a beloved winter dish traditionally judged by whether a spoon can stand upright in the bowl, and is closely tied to the country's outdoor ice-skating culture.

Because they're cheap, filling, and shelf-stable, split peas have long served as a staple "poor man's" food across multiple European culinary traditions, valued historically for stretching a household's food budget well beyond their modest cost.

When buying dried split peas, look for a bag of uniformly colored, unbroken halves without much dust or debris settled at the bottom — a bag that's sat on a shelf far too long tends to include noticeably more broken bits and takes longer to soften evenly once cooked.

Split peas are also sold occasionally as whole, unsplit dried peas, closer in form to the fresh garden pea just dried down rather than hulled and halved — a less common product most home cooks never encounter, since the split, hulled form dominates the shelf.

Because they break down so thoroughly on their own, split peas are sometimes stirred into an otherwise unrelated vegetable soup purely as a natural, dairy-free thickener, adding body to the broth without contributing much of their own distinct pea flavor to the finished dish.

A ham hock or a smoked turkey leg simmered directly in the pot alongside the peas is the traditional way American and British versions build smoky depth, relying on the meat itself rather than a separately made stock.