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GREEN PEAS (a la Creme)
Boil a pint of newly-shelled, fresh young peas in the usual way. Drain them in a colander until quite dry. Mix an ounce of butter and a tea-spoonful of flour smoothly together, over the fire; add a quarter of a pint of good, sweet cream; when it boils, put in the peas for two or three minutes, and serve as hot as possible. Time, half an hour, altogether. Probable cost, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A plain velouté-style cream sauce built in the pan, with the peas added only at the end. The whole thing takes ten minutes if the peas are already shelled.
- A pint of peasMeasured shelled, not in the pod: about 10 oz / 300 g, which needs roughly 2 lb of pods. Frozen petits pois are an honest substitute and are often sweeter than fresh supermarket peas.
- A quarter of a pint of creamIn this book that is 5 fl oz imperial, about two-thirds of a US cup. "Good, sweet cream" means fresh rather than soured, and rich — use single or heavy cream, not half-and-half, or the sauce will not coat.
- "Boil in the usual way"Salted water at a rolling boil, uncovered, until just tender. Young fresh peas need 3-5 minutes and frozen ones 2-3; the half-hour in the time line presumably covers preparation as well as the boiling. Peas boiled well past tender turn grey-green and mealy.
- The hinge: drain them properlyWater clinging to the peas will thin the cream into a puddle. Drain, then leave them in the colander a couple of minutes and shake them dry before they go into the sauce.
- Butter and flour "smoothly together, over the fire"Cook the paste over low heat for a minute or two so it loses the raw-flour taste, but keep it pale — any colour at all works against the dish.
- Adding the creamOff the heat, add the cream in stages, whisking, then return to a bare simmer until it thickens. One ounce of butter with a teaspoon of flour is a light bind; if it seems thin, let it reduce rather than adding more flour.
- Two or three minutes, and no moreThe peas are already cooked; they are only being heated through. Longer in a boiling cream sauce and they wrinkle and go dull.
- Seasoning and yieldThe original leaves it unsaid: salt, white pepper, and a scrape of nutmeg or a little sugar if the peas are starchy. Serves three or four as a side dish.
Peas à la crème is one of the standard French vegetable treatments that English cookery books absorbed wholesale in the nineteenth century. The dish depends entirely on the season: before commercial freezing, garden peas were a brief early-summer luxury, and the sugar in them begins converting to starch within hours of picking — hence the insistence on "newly-shelled, fresh young peas" rather than the older, floury ones that went into soups and purées. The costing of 1s 3d for three or four people is a reminder of how the book was used, as a household manager's reference as much as a cook's.