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GREEN PEAS, TO BOIL (a German recipe)
Put a peck of green peas into a saucepan, with four or five young carrots scraped and cut small. Sprinkle a little salt and pepper over them, and add a quarter of a pound of fresh butter. Cover the saucepan closely, and let them cook in the steam. When they begin to shrink, dredge two or three table-spoonfuls of flour over them, and shake the saucepan well over the fire till the peas are lightly coated with it. Pour a quarter of a pint of good gravy on them, and stew until tender. Cutlets may be partly broiled and steamed with the peas. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, 8d. per peck. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A dry-braise rather than a boil, despite the title: the peas cook in butter and their own steam before any liquid arrives. The quantities read alarmingly until you realise the peck refers to peas still in the pod.
- A peck of peasA peck is a dry measure of two gallons, and here it means peas in the pod. A peck of pods weighs somewhere around 7-8 lb and yields roughly 2 to 3 lb shelled, broadly consistent with the stated four or five servings. Use about 2 lb (900 g) shelled fresh or frozen peas.
- Quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, a little over half a US cup. Add it after the flour has coated the peas and let it thicken.
- Cook them dry firstThe hinge of the dish is the covered pan with butter and no water. Very low heat and a tight lid; the peas must sweat, not catch. If they stick before they shrink, the heat is too high, not the moisture too low.
- Good gravyIn Victorian usage this generally meant a strong meat stock or the strained juices of roasted meat, sometimes reduced, not the flour-bound sauce sold under the name today. A well-reduced brown veal or beef stock is the closest match; a light chicken stock will do.
- Frozen peasThey will not survive half an hour. If using frozen, sweat the carrots in the butter alone for fifteen minutes, then add the peas for the last five and finish with the flour and stock.
- The flourTwo or three tablespoons over 2 lb of vegetables is a heavy hand by modern taste, and with only 5 fl oz of liquid it gives a paste rather than a sauce. One tablespoon, or a little more stock, gives a better result.
- The cutletsThe recipe does not say what meat; lamb, mutton or veal cutlets would all suit. 'Partly broiled' means browned on a gridiron, then laid on the peas to finish. They need to reach a safe internal temperature in the pan, so allow the full half hour with the lid on, or brown them nearly through before they go in.
- SeasoningFresh butter meant unsalted. If yours is salted, hold back the salt until the stock has reduced.
Peas cooked in butter under a lid, with no water at all, is the method the French call à l'étuvée and it spread through nineteenth-century English cookbooks under a range of national labels — this one arrives as German, though the technique is common to most of northern Europe wherever butter was plentiful. The detail that dates it most firmly is the price: eightpence a peck marks peas as a cheap summer glut, bought in the pod by volume and shelled at home, which is why the recipe measures them the way a greengrocer sold them rather than the way a cook would use them. The optional cutlets steamed on top belong to the same economy, one fire and one pan doing the work of two.