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Green Pease
Wash lightly two quarts shelled pease, put into boiling water enough to cover, boil twenty minutes, add pepper, salt, and more hot water if needed to prevent burning, and two table-spoons butter rubbed into two of flour; stir well, and boil five minutes. If pods are clean and fresh, boil first in water to give flavor, skim out and put in pease. Canned pease should be rinsed before cooking.
A plain buttered pea dish thickened with a raw roux stirred in at the end. The one thing to change is the timing: twenty-five minutes of boiling was aimed at maturing garden peas picked at the point of starchiness, not at anything sold today.
- Cooking timeModern shelled English peas are tender in 3 to 5 minutes, frozen peas in 2 to 3. Twenty minutes plus five more turns them grey-green and mealy. Cook until they just yield, then proceed with the butter and flour.
- Quantity and yieldTwo quarts shelled peas is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb, which takes something like 6 to 8 lb of peas in the pod. It serves six to eight generously; halve it for a household of two or three.
- The butter and flourTwo tablespoons butter rubbed into two tablespoons flour is a raw beurre manie, added to thicken the cooking liquid into a light sauce. Because the flour is uncooked, it needs the stated few minutes of simmering and steady stirring or the dish tastes pasty. Reduce the cooking water to about a cup before adding it, or the sauce will be thin.
- Pod stockThe instruction to boil clean pods first is worth keeping and takes about 15 to 20 minutes. Strain the pods out and use the sweet green liquid as the cooking water; it is the closest this recipe gets to a real flavour base.
- SaltSalt the water at the start rather than at the twenty-minute mark as written. Peas season better from the beginning, and there is no evidence salted water toughens them.
- Canned peasThe advice to rinse still holds, since the packing liquid is salty and dull. Canned peas are already fully cooked, so they need only warming through in the sauce, not boiling.
- "Pease"The older plural, used throughout this book. It means ordinary green peas; no distinct variety is intended.
Pease was the original English word, singular and plural alike, and "pea" was back-formed from it by speakers who heard a plural where none existed; American cookbooks kept the older spelling well into the 1880s, which is where Buckeye Cookery (first published in Ohio in 1877) sits. The long boil reflects a garden reality rather than carelessness: before rapid transport and freezing, peas were shelled from pods that had often been on the vine or in the basket a day or more, and sugars had already turned to starch. That is also why the recipe bothers to simmer the pods for flavour and why it thickens the water instead of draining it, both habits of a kitchen that wasted nothing. The passing note on canned peas is a small marker of the period: commercial canning had become widespread enough after the Civil War that a household book had to tell readers what to do with a tin.