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Peas, Green, with Cream Sauce
Boil a quart of young freshly-gathered peas in slightly salted water until they are tender, then drain them in a colander. Melt two ounces of fresh butter over the fire, mix smoothly with it a dessert-spoonful of flour, and add very gradually a cupful of thick cream, or, failing this, new milk. When the sauce boils, put in the peas, stir them until they are quite hot, and serve immediately. Time, from fifteen to twenty-five minutes to boil the peas. Probable cost, 8d. per peck when in full season. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plain velouté-style sauce built in the pan, with one instruction that no longer holds: the boiling time. Everything else translates directly.
- Ignore the 15-25 minutesVictorian boiling times for vegetables were generally far longer than ours, and peas that had sat after podding would have converted sugar to starch. Young peas, fresh or frozen, are usually done in 3-5 minutes and will be dull and mealy long before fifteen.
- A quart of peasRead this as a quart of shelled peas, roughly 4 to 5 cups, somewhere around 1.25-1.5 lb. That is a substantial amount of shelling; frozen petits pois are a reasonable modern substitute.
- Dessert-spoonfulBetween a teaspoon and a tablespoon, about 2 teaspoons. With 2 oz (4 tablespoons) butter the sauce is deliberately butter-heavy and only lightly thickened, so do not increase the flour to balance it.
- New milkMilk fresh from that day's milking, unskimmed. Whole milk is the substitute. "Thick cream" is closest to double or heavy cream, and a cupful of it makes a very rich sauce for four.
- Cook the flour brieflyLet the butter and flour bubble together for a minute before the cream goes in, and add the liquid gradually as instructed, or the sauce tastes of raw paste. Once it boils it needs only a minute to thicken.
- Peck and priceThe 8d. per peck almost certainly refers to peas in the pod, a peck being a dry measure of about 2 imperial gallons, yielding perhaps 2-3 lb shelled. It is a seasonal glut price, not a guide to anything you will pay now.
- Finish fastThe peas go into the finished sauce only to reheat. Hold them there and they will keep cooking and shed skins into the cream. Salt at the end, since the boiling water was already salted.
Cassell's places this among the plainest of the green pea dishes, and its logic is the logic of the English kitchen garden: peas were a crop you raced against, sweet for a day or two after picking and starchy thereafter, which is why the recipe insists on "young freshly-gathered" peas and why the price is quoted only "when in full season." Dressing them in a butter-and-flour sauce enriched with cream is the same treatment applied across late-Victorian cookery to almost any boiled vegetable, part of the wide family of white sauces long since codified in French practice as velouté and béchamel. The long boiling time recorded here reflects general Victorian practice for vegetables rather than any judgement about this particular crop; commercial freezing, which arrived for vegetables in the 1920s and 30s, did more than anything to make the modern three-minute pea possible by halting that sugar-to-starch conversion within hours of picking.