SPLITTING PEAS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 264, 6 November 1937, Page 20

SPLITTING PEAS.

STRANGE BUSINESS. 100-YEARS-OLD FACTORY. A TIP FOR HOUSEWIVES. The Japanese ducks from Regent's Park, London, think it is worth making their \vay to Puddle Dock, Blackfriars, for lunch. With two dirty-white river swans and a flock of pigeons they wallow in the mud for dried peas which fall from the City of London's only split pea factory. Wheatsheaf and Company, of Rutland wharf, lias been splitting peas since • 1808. To-day they have 30 workmen and two machines working full time. Benjamin Smith, the founder, installed a sort of "huff-«nd-a-puff" machine, the first for scientifically splitting a pea. There was a wind shaft for blowing out the dirt, a bath for washing them, a hot kiln for heating I them till they split, and a joggler for shaking the skins loose. That took half a day to split a pea, but Benjamin made enough to give £5 and a bag of split pen* to the Baptist Church ©very Easter. Old Methods Replaced. Nowadays, with a limited company and two modern machines, it is an hour and a half from beginning to end of the splitting, cleaning and polishing. A lot of old Benjamin's processes had to be done by hand. Though peas crack naturally in two, they had sometimes to be cracked or jostled. Men went into the kiln, where the temperature was 160 degrees, and shuffled and raked until the pea* dropped in two. The men were given 20 minutes to cool down and 4d a day beer money for this work, which somewhat consoled them. The present firm still have two of Benjamin's descendants on the board, hut little of his pea-splitting methods. The peas are now dried in a revolving I kiln, until the skins crack and the two halves of the pea drop apart. Whole peo« rarely get through, as they are passed over a vibrating band and there is a wriggling sieve to trap them. Likes His Job. At the open end of the shaft is a man of 70 contemptuously tossing aside the odd pea or two which escape the roasting and come through whole. The Arm have tried to put this old man on a pension a dozen times, but he takes a sly joy in shovelling the half-baked peas aside and putting them through it all again. The peas come from India mainly; Chili, Russia, China and Australia make slight contributions.

The general manager has a system for keeping the pea-eplitting trade in the Empire and haa sent experimental seed to Australia to see if they can irrow the splitting kind.

Not every pea is suitable for splitting. They have to be fat and just at the age when they arc beginning to fall apart.

If they are too old a tiny shoot knits the two halves together. The best pea soup, this firm think, is made by the Navy. They can tell by the peas they buy—the dull, motley, Indian kind which housewives sneer at, but which actually makes the richest soup. The Army are not so fond of pea aoup and cannot make it properly. Whenever tho Navy is on the move the Admiralty ring up, a little worried, and a«k what the «plit pea stock is. It is usually between two and three thousand tons.