When I was six or seven, I accidentally fell head first through the lower glass panel of an aluminum storm door at my friend Philip’s summer house. This was at the Jersey shore, on Long Beach Island, way back at the end of the fifties. My mom, who had been sitting right by the door, screamed in horror as I was lodged half in and half out of the door with my belly laying on a jagged shard of glass still in the door. Philip’s father and my mom lifted me off the glass and they rushed me into our car. My mom then drove the ninety miles back to our hometown in northern New Jersey, where our family physician was waiting for our arrival. Doctors did that back then. I was lucky, I only needed a couple of stitches along my hairline and some bandages across my stomach.
I have no idea why I was rushing out the door that summer afternoon when I missed the door handle and I went through the glass instead. Kids are like that. I know that they re-glazed the door panel with plastic after that incident. But I have a very clear recollection of where the storm door led to: it opened onto a deck that overlooked the beach and the ocean in Harvey Cedars. My mother had rented the house a couple of summers earlier, so I was very familiar with it. It was an upside down house, meaning that the living space, kitchen and dining area were on the second floor so you could see the ocean, and the bedrooms and baths were downstairs. The deck was two stories high and came off of the kitchen/dining area.
This deck holds some pretty significant moments for me. It’s where I took my first photograph (of my Mom of course). 
It’s where I learned to play canasta under the deck table with a blanket draped over it. It’s where I watched in disbelief when Philip’s older brother, Bill, jumped off the deck into the sand and ran down the beach as if he had just dropped to the ground like a bird hopping off a branch and onto a lawn. It’s also where I first had my first bowl of ham and green pea soup.
I don’t why, but ham and pea soup came up the other day. Wait … Rosaria and I were talking about Quakers while she was making a soup with potatoes and chick peas. We got onto ham and pea soup because my friend Philip and his family were Quakers and we were talking about the Quaker school that our son attends. They were the first Quakers I ever knew. Philip would tell me about going to Sunday meeting, and how they just sat there until someone got up and started talking; talking about whatever they wanted to talk about. It sure sounded a lot different from my Sunday morning spiritual experiences. My mother was a dyed-in-the-wool Baptist, originally from Kentucky. During the summers, she made me go to the only Sunday school in Harvey Cedars which was held at the fire house every Sunday morning. The Harvey Cedars’ firehouse was the community center for most things of importance, from Santa at Christmas to block parties in the summer, and where a lot of dads hung out on hot summer Saturday nights drinking beer and talking war stories from WW2 and Korea. Even in the summer on Sunday mornings, it smelled of heating oil and the single red fire truck. I know there were no Quaker meetings at the Harvey Cedars’ firehouse. I have no idea where the Quakers met every Sunday. I can’t imagine there was a meetinghouse anywhere on Long Beach Island. But it seemed like an enviable alternative to a little wizened faced woman telling us few kids who were forced to show up about Joseph and his amazing technicolor coat.
I don’t remember too much about what we ate down at the shore. Well, that’s not exactly true, but I don’t want to digress too much from ham and green pea soup. For some reason, one weekend I was staying at Philip’s house. He, his two brothers, his sister and I were playing in the crawl space under the house. It was a magical place in the cool sand, totally dark except for the access panel on one side of the house. The house was built on pilings and the space between the sand and the first floor was sheathed by the building material of choice back then, asbestos panels. You couldn’t stand up in the crawl space. We’d play hide and seek under there for hours. You had to be careful when you scurried around like mice in the pitch black darkness not to bash your head into the wooden girders overhead. As you lay in hushed silence in a sand bunker trying to avoid being tagged, you could hear anyone overhead walking around, talking, or using the bathroom. During our various sessions of playing hide and seek, we got an earful of Philip’s parents personal life. On this particular occasion, however, only Philip’s dad and his siblings and I were at the house. We were all going to have lunch and then pile into their car and drive back to Northern New Jersey where we all lived in the same town during the winter. It was a grey, cool day with the wind coming off the ocean. When we came up from the crawl space we shook ourselves off out on the deck and tumbled inside. The big windows overlooking the ocean were steamed up, and I smelled the delicious aroma of some kind of soup. All of us plopped down at the well worn dining table and Philip’s father, who was a gruff ex-navy dentist, dealt out orange plastic bowls of green pea soup and ham. I have no idea whether he made the soup from stock or if it was out of a Campbell’s can. I suspect the latter, with chunks of leftover ham thrown in. It was my first comfort food moment. I was enthralled by the taste, the color (pea green) and the its thickness and texture. I’m sure there were plenty of slices of Wonderbread and margarine to go around. Philip and I took our bowls cupped in our hands and went out on the deck. The smell of the ham and green pea soup laced with the briny saltiness blowing off the ocean was intoxicating. It was wonderful. It was some sort of defining moment for me and a benchmark for how I looked at and tasted soup for along time.
Back home, I started pestering my mother for ham and green pea soup. She made it a couple of times from a can without it resembling the mysterious taste and satisfaction of Philip’s dad’s ham and green pea soup. Not even close. She’d mutter that she didn’t see what the big deal was about pea soup. Later, much later, when I was a teenager in college, much to my amazement she’d say the same thing about takeout pizza from a brick oven pizzeria which I brought home one evening after work. “What’s so great about this?” she asked. I opened my mouth to remind her about ham and green pea soup of earlier years, but I knew she’d long forgotten about it.
Prompted by my recollection of ham and green pea soup at Harvey Cedars, I recently made homemade pea soup. Here’s what I did.
2 cups dried split green peas
1 medium onion chopped
2 cloves garlic chopped
4 cups chicken stock (preferably homemade)
2 smoked ham hocks (or a ham bone, or chopped up leftover ham)
2 oz. pancetta
2 T olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
Soak the green beans in cold water for at least 30 minutes, changing the water once or twice. Bring the chicken stock to a boil in a sauce pan, then set aside. Get a small stock pot, large sauce pan or a marmite, heat up the olive oil, and add the onions. Sauté over medium heat until translucent, then add the garlic. Drain the the peas, and throw them with the onions and the garlic. Add the hot chicken stock and the smoked ham hocks. Bring to a simmer and cook for an hour-and-a-half, until the peas have almost dissolved, and the soup is thick. Stir every once in a while to make sure nothing is sticking to the bottom of the pan. Add salt and pepper to taste.
When ready, remove the ham hock, gently pan sauté the chopped pancetta for a couple of minutes until tender. Pour the pea soup into bowls and sprinkle a pinch of the pancetta on top. Serve immediately.
