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Peas, Stewed, and Lettuce
Take two lettuces, one quart of peas, four table-spoonfuls of gravy, one ounce of butter, a tea-spoonful of flour, and one of castor sugar, pepper, and salt. Wash and take off the outside leaves of the lettuces, lay them in cold water for two hours, slice them in fine strips, and put them in a saucepan with the peas, gravy, and butter rubbed into the flour, the sugar, pepper, and salt. Cover the saucepan, and stew till the peas are tender.
A braise of peas with shredded lettuce, cooked in barely enough liquid to steam. The whole method depends on a tight lid and low heat, since four tablespoons of gravy will vanish quickly over a brisk flame.
- The hinge: almost no liquidFour tablespoons of gravy is all the moisture there is, apart from what the wet lettuce brings. Use a heavy pan with a well-fitting lid over low heat, and check once or twice; if the pan runs dry before the peas soften, add a spoonful of water rather than more fat.
- A quart of peasThe recipe does not say whether the quart is measured shelled or in the pod. A quart of shelled peas is roughly 1¼ lb (about 570 g), which would take something like 3 lb of pods; if the quart is measured in the pod, expect far less. A pound of frozen peas is a fair substitute, though they need far less cooking.
- GravyIn Victorian usage this means meat juices or a strong brown stock, not thickened sauce from a packet. Good beef or chicken stock reduced a little does the job.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar. Ordinary granulated dissolves fine here; the quantity is a teaspoon, meant to lift the peas, not sweeten the dish.
- Butter rubbed into flourThis is beurre mani he paste of 1 oz (30 g) butter and a teaspoon of flour that thickens the small amount of liquid into a glaze as it melts. Work it cold with a fork and drop it in in pieces.
- The two-hour soakThe recipe gives no reason for it; cold-water soaking of this kind is usually taken to have revived limp market lettuce and floated out grit and insects. Modern washed cos or romaine needs a rinse and a spin, no more.
- TimingYoung fresh peas are tender in 10 to 15 minutes; older or larger ones may want 20. Frozen peas need about 5 minutes, added after the lettuce has wilted, or they turn grey and mealy.
- YieldServes four as a vegetable alongside lamb, ham or chicken. The lettuce collapses to almost nothing, so the finished volume is much less than it looks going in.
Peas stewed with lettuce belongs to the English adaptation of the French petits pois — peas braised in butter with lettuce, spring onions and a little sugar, a treatment generally traced to eighteenth-century French kitchen practice and carried into English cookery books through the nineteenth. The lettuce is there for moisture and body as much as flavour: with only a few spoonfuls of gravy in the pan, shredded leaves would have supplied much of the liquid that steamed the peas. The dish demonstrates stewing a vegetable in its own juices, the technique behind a good deal of Victorian vegetable cookery.