Home › The Principles of Cookery › PEAS, GREEN (a la Paysanne)
PEAS, GREEN (a la Paysanne)
Prepare the peas as in the preceding recipe. Take a handful of parsley, a few green onions, and a few cabbage and cos-lettuces, wash them, and break, instead of cutting them. Drain them from the water, and put them with the peas over a very slow fire. No other moisture than the butter will be required. Be careful, by stirring the contents of the stewpan repeatedly, that they do not burn. When done enough, add pepper and salt, and serve.
A butter braise with no added liquid: the peas and greens cook in their own moisture over the lowest possible heat. Everything depends on keeping that heat gentle and the pan covered.
- The hinge: no water means low heat and a lidThe hinge: no water means very low heat -- With only butter in the pan, the greens must release enough moisture to cook the peas. Use a heavy-bottomed saucepan on the smallest burner at its lowest setting, and stir repeatedly as the recipe directs; a lid is not called for in the original but will help hold the moisture in. On modern thin pans over gas, the butter will brown and the peas will scorch before they soften.
- Cos lettuceCos is romaine. One or two small heads, or the outer leaves of a large one, torn into pieces. A couple of handfuls of green cabbage leaves goes in the same way.
- Green onionsSpring onions or scallions, the white and green both, torn or left in short lengths. Four or five is plenty for a pound of peas.
- Break, do not cutThe instruction is deliberate and recurs across period cookery writing. The usual explanation given at the time was that the knife spoiled the flavour of the leaf; tearing also leaves larger, more ragged pieces. Keep the pieces large; they collapse to almost nothing.
- Drain, but not too wellThe recipe says only to drain the leaves from the washing water, and insists no moisture beyond the butter is needed. Shake the leaves off rather than spinning or towelling them bone dry.
- TimingThe recipe says only 'when done enough'. Reckon on roughly 20 to 30 minutes for fresh young peas cooked this way, longer for older ones. Frozen peas cannot be used as written; they carry their own water and will be mush before the lettuce has wilted. Add them in the last five minutes if that is all you have.
- YieldYield and seasoning -- The recipe gives no quantities, so yield depends entirely on how many peas you start with. Season only at the end, as the original says, since salt added early will pull water from the greens.
This is one of a family of French dishes in which green peas are stewed with lettuce, spring onions and butter rather than boiled in water — the best-known relative being petits pois à la française. The tag à la paysanne, "peasant style," is often taken to suggest a plainer version, without stock, sugar or thickening: whatever green things the garden offered, cooked down in butter until they made their own sauce. What the recipe demonstrates is a technique — the closed-pan braise, where the vegetables supply the cooking liquid — well suited to young greens. The insistence on breaking leaves instead of cutting them is said to be a common instruction in older English kitchen writing, generally explained on the grounds that the knife spoils the flavour, though the practical effect is simply a leaf that wilts faster and holds together less.