Home › The Principles of Cookery › PEAS, GREEN, BOILED (Dr. Kitchener's recipe)
PEAS, GREEN, BOILED (Dr. Kitchener's recipe)
"Young green peas well dressed are one of the most delicious delicacies of the vegetable kingdom. They must be young; it is equally indispensable that they be fresh gathered, and cooked as soon as they are shelled, for they soon lose both their colour and sweetness. If you wish to feast upon peas in perfection, you must have them gathered the same day they are dressed, and put on to boil within half an hour after they are shelled. Pass them through a riddle, i.e. a coarse sieve, which is made for the purpose of separating them. This precaution is necessary, for large and small peas cannot be boiled together, as the former will take more time than the latter. For a peck of peas, set on a saucepan with a gallon of water in it; when it boils, put in your peas with a table-spoonful of salt; skim it well, keep them boiling quick from twenty to thirty minutes, according to their age and size; the best way to judge of their being done enough, and indeed the only way to make sure of cooking them to and not beyond the point of perfection, or, as the pea-eaters say, of 'boiling them to a bubble,' is to take them out with a spoon and taste them. When they are done enough, drain them on a hair sieve. If you like them buttered, put them into a pie-dish, divide some butter into small bits, and lay them on the peas; put another dish over them, and turn them over and over; this will melt the butter through them; but as all people do not like buttered peas, you had better send them to table plain as they come out of the saucepan, with melted butter in a sauce tureen. It is usual to boil some mint with the peas; but if you wish to garnish the peas with mint, boil a few sprigs in a saucepan by themselves. A peck of young peas will not yield more than enough for a couple of hearty pea-eaters; when the pods are full, it may serve for three. Never think of purchasing peas ready-shelled, for the cogent reasons assigned in the first part of this recipe."
The method is sound in outline and wrong in one crucial number: nobody now boils young peas for half an hour. Read the timing as belonging to peas that were often older and starchier than anything sold today.
- Boil them for minutes, not half an hourModern shelled peas, garden or frozen, are tender in 2 to 4 minutes in salted boiling water. Twenty to thirty minutes turns them grey-green and mealy. Kitchiner's advice to spoon a few out and taste is still the only reliable test; apply it from the two-minute mark.
- A peckA peck is a dry measure of 8 quarts, which for peas in the pod is on the order of 7 to 8 lb and yields perhaps 2 to 3 lb shelled. His claim that this feeds only a couple of hearty eaters is very generous by any measure; treat it as serving six to eight.
- Riddle and hair sieveA riddle is a coarse sieve used here to grade the peas by size so they cook evenly, worth doing if you shell your own from a mixed picking. A hair sieve is simply a straining sieve; a colander does the job.
- Salt and waterA gallon of water with one tablespoon of salt is about right in proportion, and scales down: about two-thirds of a teaspoon of salt per litre. Keep the pan at a fast boil and uncovered so the colour holds.
- Buttering in the dishThe two-dish trick, butter dotted over hot drained peas and the whole thing inverted repeatedly, coats them without crushing. Drain them thoroughly first or the butter will slide off into a puddle of water.
- MintBoiling mint with the peas flavours the water more than the peas. Cooking sprigs separately, as he suggests, keeps the garnish bright; a knob of mint butter stirred in at the end works better still.
- Frozen peasHis whole argument, that peas lose sugar to starch within hours of picking, is exactly why commercially frozen peas usually taste sweeter than fresh ones bought loose. They are blanched within hours of harvest and need only a minute or two.
The recipe comes from Dr William Kitchiner, whose The Cook's Oracle (first published 1817) was one of the earliest English cookery books to insist on tested quantities and to write in a chatty, opinionated first person. His fixation on speed from pod to pot is chemically well founded: the sugars in a green pea begin converting to starch soon after picking, which is why he warns against buying them ready-shelled. The phrase "boiling them to a bubble" he attributes to "pea-eaters", and the whole passage is a reminder that in a season without freezing or air freight, green peas were a brief summer luxury worth this much fuss.