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Peas and Onions - French Style
Cut one slice bacon in shreds crosswise, using the shears for this purpose. Cook bacon with one-fourth cup butter about ten minutes, without scorching bacon. Remove scraps of bacon, add two cups fresh peas, one dozen small onions and a sprig of mint. Cook until peas and onions are soft, adding one-fourth cup boiling water to prevent scorching. Beat one egg yolk slightly, add onethird cup cream and one head of lettuce cut in quarters (use lettuce hearts), season with salt and pepper. Let boil up once and serve.
A French-style braise of peas in butter, finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. The whole dish takes about twenty minutes and lives or dies by how the finish is handled.
- The hinge: the liaisonEgg yolk beaten with cream will curdle if held at a boil. The instruction to "let boil up once" means pull the pan off the heat the instant the surface stirs; better still, stir the yolk-cream mixture into the pan off the heat and let residual warmth thicken it.
- Butter quantityOne-fourth cup is 4 tablespoons (about 55 g) for two cups of peas, which is generous by modern standards. Halving it still gives a glossy sauce, especially since the bacon renders fat as well.
- Small onionsA dozen "small onions" means pearl or boiling onions, roughly an inch across, peeled whole. Frozen peeled pearl onions work; ordinary onions cut in wedges will cook faster and break up.
- Fresh peasTwo cups shelled peas is roughly 2 lb in the pod. Frozen peas are fine but need only 4-5 minutes, so give the onions a head start and add the peas near the end.
- Timing the onionsPearl onions want 15-20 minutes of gentle braising to go soft. The recipe says nothing about covering the pan, but a lid helps; add the quarter cup of boiling water as directed so the pan steams rather than fries.
- The lettuceQuartered lettuce hearts go in at the very end and are meant to wilt only slightly, keeping some crispness. Little Gem or the heart of a romaine holds up better than butterhead.
- The baconThe shreds are removed after flavouring the butter and are not returned to the dish as written. They can be scattered back over the top at serving; they will soften if stirred into the sauce.
- YieldServes four as a side dish. It does not reheat well, since the yolk sauce will break on a second boil.
This is the English-language version of *petits pois à la française*, a preparation documented across nineteenth-century French cookery in which young peas are stewed in butter with small onions and lettuce rather than boiled in water — the lettuce and a lidded pan supply the moisture. Bacon and small onions are associated with the *à la bonne femme* treatment, though no priority between the two preparations is established, and the sprig of mint is a distinctly Anglo-American touch, since mint with peas belongs to British rather than French habit.