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Peas, Tinned
Put the tin into cold water before opening, bring the water to a boil, and let it boil for five minutes. Cut open the tin at top, pour out the liquor, and serve the peas with a few sprigs of fresh mint that have been boiled for two or three minutes. Add half a tea-spoonful of icing sugar, a salt-spoonful of salt, and a good-sized piece of butter.
A method from the era when tinned peas were a luxury rather than a fallback, and the cook's job was to make them taste like garden peas again. Nearly all of it still works; the heating method is the one part to abandon.
- Do not boil the sealed tinThere is no need to heat a modern can unopened, and it is simpler to open the can, drain, and heat the peas in a small saucepan with the butter for a minute or two instead.
- Two minutes, not fiveTinned peas are already fully cooked in the can. Five minutes at a boil, even inside the tin, softens them further than you want. Heat them just through.
- Salt-spoonfulA salt-spoon is the smallest of the Victorian table spoons, roughly a quarter of a teaspoon. Taste first — modern canning brine is already salted.
- The liquorThe cloudy starchy brine in the can is what makes tinned peas taste tinned. Pour it off, as directed, and do not be tempted to reduce it as a sauce.
- Icing sugarConfectioners' sugar in the US; it dissolves instantly on hot peas, which may be why it is preferred to granulated here. Half a teaspoon, as given, should not read as sweet.
- The mintBoiling the sprigs for two or three minutes softens them and takes off the raw edge. Fresh mint torn in at the end works as well and tastes brighter.
- YieldThe recipe names no quantity; scaled to a modern 15 oz / 400 g can it will serve two, three at a stretch as part of a larger meal.
Tinned peas were a new sort of ingredient requiring a new sort of handling. Commercial canning descends from the work of Nicolas Appert in early nineteenth-century France, and by the time this dictionary was compiled British households could buy tinned garden peas year round — a genuine novelty for a vegetable whose fresh season lasts weeks. The processing cost them their sweetness and their colour, which is precisely why the recipe adds sugar, butter and mint: the seasonings are there to reconstruct the flavour of a fresh shelled pea. Some Continental and British packers of the period were also known to restore the lost green with copper salts, a practice that drew repeated complaint from Victorian food analysts.