Home › The Principles of Cookery › VEGETABLES, SPRING (cooked in the German manner)
VEGETABLES, SPRING (cooked in the German manner)
Take a handful of parsley, and the same of sorrel, lettuce, and chervil; pick and wash the vegetables, shred them finely, and put them into a saucepan with a pint and three-quarters of green peas. Pour over them as much good broth as will cover them, season with pepper and salt, and simmer gently for two hours. In a separate saucepan boil three-quarters of a pound of rice in water till tender. Stir the boiled vegetables into this, season with pepper and salt, add a slice of butter, and beat the mixture to a paste. Serve on bread. Time, two hours.
A purée of spring greens and peas bound with rice, closer to a thick pottage than a vegetable side. The proportions are generous and the timings belong to an era of long, slack cooking.
- The two hours is the thing to changePeas and tender herbs simmered for two hours lose colour and turn flat and grey-green. Twenty to thirty minutes brings everything soft enough to beat to a paste while keeping some sweetness; add the chervil in the last few minutes, as its anise note cooks off quickly.
- A pint and three-quarters of green peasThis is a volume measure of shelled peas. Read as imperial pints it comes to roughly 4 cups, about 1 lb 5 oz; on a US pint, nearer 3 1/2 cups. Frozen peas stand in perfectly and need only minutes.
- Sorrel and chervilNeither is a supermarket standard. Sorrel is the sour element the dish is built around; if you cannot find it, the closest approach is spinach with lemon juice added off the heat, and it will not taste the same. Chervil is sold by better greengrocers in spring, or grown easily from seed.
- Rice quantityThree-quarters of a pound of raw rice is about 1 3/4 cups and will yield some 5 cups cooked, which dominates the vegetables. A short or medium grain breaks down best for beating to a paste; halve the rice if you want the greens to lead.
- "A slice of butter"A period phrase for a piece cut off the block, in practice 1 to 2 oz. Add it at the end, off the heat, while beating.
- "Good broth"Unsalted or lightly salted stock, since it reduces as the vegetables cook and the mixture is seasoned twice. Vegetable stock keeps the dish meatless; the original assumes household meat broth.
- Beating to a pasteThe original names no implement. A brief pulse in a food processor gets there faster, but stop short of smooth: the texture wanted is coarse and spreadable, not a soup.
- "Serve on bread"Spooned over slices of toasted or stale bread in the bowl, as sops. It serves six to eight as a substantial first course, and reheats thickly enough to want a splash of broth.
Cassell's elsewhere labels a method by nationality — "in the German manner" — and here that means a herb-and-pea purée thickened with grain and eaten over bread. The sorrel is the historical marker: before lemons were cheap and universal, sourness in a British or German kitchen came from sorrel, verjuice or vinegar, and sorrel was a standard kitchen-garden plant that has since largely fallen out of commercial cultivation. Serving a thick pottage over bread rather than in a bowl alone is older still, a survival of the medieval sop, and it explains the odd instruction at the end of what otherwise reads as a vegetable side dish.