Green Peas
Cook peas in boiling water. Use just enough water to prevent them from burning. Add salt fifteen minutes before removing them from fire. Season with butter and pepper.
A bare-bones method from a book written when green peas meant peas shelled that morning. The one thing worth adjusting is the timing, which the salt instruction quietly reveals.
- The timing is the hingeSalting fifteen minutes before the end implies a total cooking time of at least fifteen minutes, and probably longer. Young shelled peas are done in 3 to 5 minutes; frozen peas need 2 to 3. Beyond that they turn grey-green, mealy and sweetless.
- Salt whenever you likeThe old worry was that early salting toughened the skins. It does not, at least not measurably in a few minutes of boiling. Salt the water at the start and the peas will be seasoned through rather than only on the surface.
- "Just enough water"The recipe's stated reason is simply to keep the peas from burning, but little water works in your favour anyway: a shallow pan, lid on, steams as much as it boils and keeps the sugars in the pot instead of pouring them down the drain. Half a cup of water for a pound of shelled peas is plenty.
- June peas versus supermarket peasThis recipe assumes peas picked hours earlier, when they are still sweet. Fresh peas in a pod that have sat in transit for days convert their sugar to starch; frozen peas, blanched within hours of picking, are usually the better buy outside of a garden or farm stand.
- QuantityReckon on 1 lb of peas in the pod per person, which yields roughly a third of that shelled. Two pounds of shelled peas serves six as a side.
- FinishingDrain well before adding butter, or the butter slides off into the water. A tablespoon or two per pound of shelled peas, black pepper, and a torn mint sprig for the English treatment, or a shredded lettuce leaf if you lean French.
Green peas eaten fresh rather than dried were a luxury for centuries in Europe, and a spring and early-summer one only: the pea's sugars begin turning to starch the moment it is picked, so it had to be grown near the table. The great change came in the 1920s and 1930s, when Clarence Birdseye's quick-freezing work made blanched peas a year-round staple. The instruction to add salt late reflects a long-held kitchen belief that salted water toughened the skins of peas and beans, a rule repeated in household manuals well into the twentieth century.