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Green Peas and New Carrots in Cream Sauce
Cook one and one-half cups of peas in just enough water to prevent them from burning. Add salt fifteen minutes before removing them from range. Wash, scrub and scrape new carrots and cut them in one-fourth inch cubes (there should be one and one-half cups); cook in boiling salted water until tender. Drain and mix with peas. Reheat them in one and one-half cups of Cream Sauce (for recipe see Page 151).
A simple June side dish that depends entirely on young vegetables and a well-made white sauce. Two things need translating: the cream sauce it points to, and the assumption that peas are shelled fresh that morning.
- The cream sauceThe referenced sauce is presumably a standard white sauce of the period: butter and flour cooked together until the flour loses its raw taste, milk or thin cream added, seasoned with salt and white pepper. The exact proportions on Page 151 are not reproduced here; a medium sauce of this period generally runs about 2 tbsp each of butter and flour per cup of liquid. At 1 1/2 cups of sauce to 3 cups of vegetables this is a generous coating, not a soup.
- PeasThe recipe assumes fresh-shelled peas, which cook in 5 to 8 minutes. Frozen peas need 2 to 3 minutes and should simply be warmed in the finished sauce. Canned peas are already cooked and only need reheating.
- "Just enough water to prevent burning"This appears deliberate: period advice favoured cooking peas in a shallow film of water so less of their sweetness leached away. A very shallow depth of water in a covered pan over low heat gets at the same idea.
- Salting the peas lateAdding salt fifteen minutes before the end may reflect a period belief that early salting toughened the skins; note that the instruction also implies a much longer boil than fresh young peas actually need. With modern peas cooking in under ten minutes, salt the water from the start and lose nothing.
- Carrot diceQuarter-inch cubes cook through in 6 to 8 minutes in boiling water. Cut them evenly or the batch will be a mix of mush and crunch. Scraping rather than peeling only works on genuinely new carrots with thin skins; peel supermarket carrots.
- ReheatingFold the drained vegetables into the hot sauce and warm gently. Boiling at this stage will break the peas and thin the sauce as the starch overcooks.
- YieldAbout 4 cups of dressed vegetables, or four to six servings alongside a roast. A grating of nutmeg or chopped mint is period-appropriate and welcome.
Peas and carrots in white sauce belong to the New England-influenced domestic cookery that dominated American cookbooks in the decades around 1900, when a competently made flour-thickened cream sauce was treated as the foundation of vegetable cookery. This is the brief window when garden peas are sweet and carrots are small enough to scrape rather than peel. The instruction to cook peas in barely any water reflects a genuine shift in the period's advice, as writers on household science began arguing that vegetables boiled in floods of water gave up their flavour and, as they were then starting to suspect, their nutritive value with it.