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Peas
1 quart cooked green peas, 2 ounces of lean cooked ham cut into dice, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 2 tablespoons good stock, 1 teaspoon flour, 1/2 small onion finely chopped, a pinch of sugar, grated nutmeg, salt and pepper to taste. Fry onion until lightly browned in Crisco, add flour and ham, stir over fire for a minute or two, then put in peas, stock, sugar, and nutmeg. Season to taste, simmer for ten minutes, stirring occasionally, then serve.
A quick side dish of stewed peas with ham, from a promotional cookbook built around Crisco. The method is sound; the only real adjustment is timing, since the peas here are already cooked.
- CriscoCrisco was and is a hydrogenated vegetable shortening, introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911. Two tablespoons of butter or a mild olive oil will do the same job and taste better with ham and nutmeg.
- A quart of cooked peasThat is about 4 cups, roughly a bag and a quarter of 16-oz frozen peas cooked, or about 3 lb of peas in the pod. The peas go in already tender, so they may well be left over from a previous meal.
- The ten-minute simmerThis is the point to adjust. Ten minutes will turn already-cooked peas grey and mealy. Bring the pan back to a bare simmer and give it two or three minutes, just long enough to bind the sauce and warm the peas through.
- Two tablespoons of stockNot a typo, but very little liquid for a quart of peas. With a teaspoon of flour it makes a thin glaze that clings rather than a sauce. If you want something looser, add stock a tablespoon at a time; more than about a quarter cup and the flour will taste raw at this short cooking time.
- Cook the flour firstThe instruction to stir the flour and ham over the fire for a minute or two is doing real work. Skip it and the small amount of flour will read as paste.
- Nutmeg and sugarA pinch of each, no more. Grate the nutmeg fresh; pre-ground nutmeg from an old jar contributes little but dust. The sugar is there to prop up peas that have already been boiled once.
- The hamTwo ounces of lean cooked ham, diced small. A good end piece of baked or boiled ham is ideal; deli ham works but salts the dish more, so season at the end.
- YieldServes four to six as a vegetable alongside a roast or chops.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble, and like the company's other cookery books of the period it exists partly to put Crisco into as many recipes as possible — including ones, like this vegetable side, where an older cook would simply have reached for butter or bacon fat. That commercial purpose aside, the dish itself is a straightforward English and American household treatment of green peas: petits pois à la française and its many relatives all rest on the same idea of stewing peas briefly with a little fat and an aromatic, though the classic French version leans on butter, lettuce and small onions rather than cured pork. The habit of finishing peas with a pinch of sugar and a grating of nutmeg is older than the book, and is often said to have helped peas that were boiled hard. It may also be read as a recipe for using up leftovers, which was a routine expectation of the daily-menu format the book is organised around.