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New Potatoes with New Peas
Prepare potatoes as for New Potatoes with Chive Sauce (see recipe Page 78), omitting the Chives. Cook one cup of new peas until tender, in as little boiling salted water as possible. Drain; add to potatoes. Reheat potatoes and peas in Cream Sauce.
A short assembly recipe that leans on two others in the same book: scraped new potatoes and a basic cream sauce. Once you supply those, it takes about twenty-five minutes.
- The missing base recipe"Prepare potatoes as for New Potatoes with Chive Sauce" points back to a page not reproduced here. For new potatoes this would normally mean scraping rather than peeling, then boiling in salted water until just tender, roughly 12-18 minutes depending on size. Drain them well and let the surface steam dry before saucing, or the sauce will slacken.
- Cream SauceThe book's own Cream Sauce is not reproduced here. In cookery of this period such a sauce is generally a plain white sauce: about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a cup of milk, or milk and cream, cooked a couple of minutes to lose the raw flour taste and seasoned with salt and pepper, sometimes a scrape of nutmeg. About a cup of sauce suits this quantity.
- "New peas" means fresh-shelledOne cup shelled needs about a pound of peas in the pod. Frozen peas stand in perfectly well and want only 2-3 minutes; they are already blanched, so long cooking only dulls them.
- Cook the peas hard and fast"As little boiling salted water as possible" is the whole technique: a shallow pan, water barely covering, lid off, 3-5 minutes for young peas. Older or starchier peas take longer but never turn sweet again, so taste rather than time them.
- ReheatingCombine over low heat and stir gently just until warmed through. A boil at this stage breaks the potatoes up and can cause the sauce to separate; if it thickens too much, loosen it with a spoonful of milk.
- Proportions and yieldThe recipe gives no potato quantity or number of servings; a pound to a pound and a half of new potatoes against the cup of peas would serve about four as a side dish. Salt in the sauce rather than at the table.
Creamed new potatoes and peas is a fixed point of the American late-spring table, and its seasonal placement is simply a matter of the calendar: before refrigerated shipping, both were genuinely seasonal, arriving together in the same few weeks and eaten at their sweetest. The pairing is often said to have a long association with early-summer holidays in the eastern and midwestern states, and cream sauce was the standard dressing for almost any tender young vegetable in household cookery of the period, cheap, filling and made from things a kitchen always had. The recipe's dependence on two earlier pages is characteristic of the book: 52 Sunday Dinners was arranged as a year of menus.