Home › The Principles of Cookery › GREEN PEAS (a la Franoise)
GREEN PEAS (a la Franoise)
Shell a peck of freshly-gathered young peas, and put them into plenty of cold spring water. Add a quarter of a pound of fresh butter, and work the peas well with the hand until they stick together. Drain them in a colander, and put them into a saucepan, with a little pepper and salt, and a wine-glassful of water. Let them simmer very gently for forty minutes, or until they are tender; add two large lumps of sugar dipped in water, and, when they have been taken off the fire a minute or two, the yolk of an egg beaten with a dessertspoonful of cold water. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A straightforward buttered pea dish thickened at the last moment with egg yolk. Two things in the original need translating: the enormous quantity and the forty-minute simmer.
- A peck of peasA peck is eight dry quarts, roughly 8 lb of peas in the pod, which shells out to around 2 1/2 to 3 lb of peas. That is a generous vegetable course for four or five; 2 lb of shelled peas (fresh or frozen) is closer to modern appetites.
- Wine-glassfulIn Victorian cookery books a wine-glass is about 2 fl oz, or a scant quarter cup. It is meant to be barely enough liquid to keep the pan from catching, since the peas cook mostly in butter and their own moisture.
- Lumps of sugarTwo large lumps are somewhere in the region of 2 teaspoons of sugar. The dipping may have been to help them dissolve; add the sugar loose and stir.
- The forty minutesThis timing assumes peas picked and shelled by hand and possibly less than young. Modern shelled peas, and certainly frozen ones, are tender in 3 to 8 minutes and turn grey and mealy long before forty. Cook until just tender and stop.
- Working the butter inRubbing cold butter through the wet peas with the hand coats each pea before cooking begins. Do not skip it or substitute melted butter.
- The egg yolk liaisonThis is the hinge. The yolk goes in off the heat, after a minute or two of cooling, and the pan must not return to a boil or the sauce will scramble into curds. Stir it through and serve at once.
- Spring waterCookery books of the period routinely specify spring water. Ordinary cold tap water is fine.
- Seasoning and servingSalt lightly at the start and correct at the end, since the butter and reduction concentrate it. Serve as a hot vegetable course on its own, in the French manner, rather than as a side lost among others.
Peas a la francaise refers to the French habit of stewing young peas in butter with almost no water, rather than boiling them in a large pot as English cooks generally did. The classic Parisian version braises them with shredded lettuce and small onions; this one dispenses with both and finishes instead with a yolk liaison, the same trick used to bind a blanquette. The instruction to shell peas "freshly-gathered" is not decoration: sugar in a pea begins converting to starch within hours of picking, which is why nineteenth-century writers treat garden peas as a brief seasonal luxury and why frozen peas, blanched within hours of harvest, are often sweeter than what a market can offer. The recipe notes a cost of 1s. 2d., though a peck of pods was a good deal of shelling for a kitchenmaid.