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Garnish, Green Peas For
Boil some young green peas until tender. Drain them until quite dry, then put them into a saucepan with half an ounce of butter for a quart of peas, a little salt and pepper, and a salt-spoonful of moist sugar. Shake them over the fire for a few minutes, and pile them in the middle of a dish of cutlets. Time, fifteen minutes to boil the peas, five or ten minutes to shake them over the fire. Probable cost, 8d. to 1s. per peck. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A simple buttered pea garnish, written when peas came in the pod and were shelled at home. The only real adjustment is the cooking time.
- Fifteen minutes is too longModern shelled peas, and certainly frozen ones, are tender in 2 to 4 minutes in boiling salted water. Fifteen minutes leaves them grey and mealy, which defeats the purpose of a garnish meant to look bright green against cutlets.
- A peck of peasThe cost is quoted per peck of peas in the pod, 8 quarts by dry measure, which might shell out to something between 2 and 3 lb of peas depending on how full the pods are. The recipe itself is measured by the quart of shelled peas, roughly 1 lb 4 oz, so a 1 lb bag of frozen petits pois is a close enough stand-in.
- Moist sugarVictorian moist sugar was an unrefined or partly refined soft sugar, closest today to light brown sugar. A salt-spoonful is about a quarter teaspoon, so the sweetening is barely detectable and mainly there to lift underripe peas.
- Drain them until quite dryThis is the instruction that matters. Wet peas dilute the half ounce of butter into a thin pool that runs across the dish. Tip them into a colander, let the steam go, then return them to a dry pan.
- Shaking over the fireMedium heat, and only long enough to coat and warm through, a minute or two rather than the five to ten given. The pan is being used to glaze, not to cook.
- Butter ratioHalf an ounce, about one tablespoon, to a quart of peas is a light coating by modern standards. Doubling it makes a glossier garnish without turning it into a buttered side dish.
- ServingSufficient for six or seven as a garnish piled in the centre of a platter of cutlets, not as a vegetable course in its own right.
Its purpose is decorative: a mound of green in the well of a dish of lamb or veal cutlets arranged in a ring, a common nineteenth-century service for chops. Green peas were strongly seasonal in Britain before commercial freezing, arriving in late spring and early summer and sold by the peck in the pod, which is why the costing here is given by volume for unshelled peas. The pinch of moist sugar is a practical hedge rather than a flourish, since peas begin converting sugar to starch as soon as they are picked, and a day or two between field and kitchen was normal. Clarence Birdseye's quick-freezing work in the 1920s eventually made the pea a year-round vegetable, and with it made this kind of careful coaxing of tired peas largely unnecessary.