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PEAS, GREEN (a la Creme)
Take two quarts of young green peas, toss them in a stewpan with a bit of butter, and let them stew over a gentle fire; add a little bunch of parsley and shallots. When nearly ready, season with a little salt and pepper; remove the parsley and shallots, and mix in a wine-glassful of cream sweetened with a little sugar.
A plain French-style braise of peas in butter, finished with sweetened cream. The whole thing lives or dies on the peas themselves and on keeping the heat low.
- Butter braise, not boilingNo water is added: the peas cook in butter and their own moisture over the gentlest heat. A heavy pan helps, and the pan wants shaking rather than stirring. The recipe does not specify whether the pan is covered.
- Two quarts of peasThe book does not say whether shelled or in the pod. Two quarts shelled is roughly 2.5 lb and serves six to eight; two quarts in the pod yields around a pint shelled, enough for three. Given the single wine-glass of cream, the smaller reading is the likelier one.
- "Young" is the operative wordThis treatment assumes small, sweet, freshly picked peas that cook through in ten to fifteen minutes. Older or starchy peas turn mealy under a long butter stew. Frozen petits pois are the closest modern equivalent and need only five to eight minutes.
- A wine-glassfulIn Victorian recipe books this is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. Add it off the heat or at the barest simmer; cream boiled hard may split.
- Shallots and parsley as a bundleTie them together or the shallots will be a nuisance to fish out. Whole peeled shallots, not chopped, since they are removed before serving.
- The sugarA pinch only, perhaps half a teaspoon, meant to reinforce the sweetness of garden peas rather than make a sweet dish. Modern peas, frozen within hours of picking, generally need none.
- Season at the endSalt added early is often said to toughen the skins in a dry braise. The recipe holds it back until the peas are nearly done.
Peas dressed à la crème belong to the family of French garden-pea preparations that English cookery took up wholesale in the nineteenth century, alongside petits pois à la française with its lettuce. What such treatments tend to share is a reluctance to boil the peas away: they sweat in butter with a few aromatics, so that as much of the sugar as possible stays in the pan instead of going down the sink. The technique was meant to be learned once and applied to whatever the kitchen garden sent up. Its presence also dates the book to a world of seasonal peas — the pea was among the first vegetables to be successfully canned and later frozen, and the elaborate care taken here to coax sweetness from a short-lived crop is precisely the labour those industries went on to make unnecessary.