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Peas
Chop little onions very fine, chop lettuce very fine, put with peas and cook together. (As made at Sherry's in New York city.)
— Mrs. J. H. Bagley
A one-line receipt in the French manner, with everything left to the cook's judgment. It is essentially peas braised in the water given off by shredded lettuce, and the proportions below are the conventional ones for that method.
- The hinge: no added waterThe hinge: liquid -- The receipt specifies no water, and the lettuce, shredded and covered in a heavy pan over low heat, will give off moisture enough to steam the peas. That is the likely intent, though the receipt itself says nothing either way; much more than a few tablespoons of added water and you are boiling them.
- Missing fatThe receipt omits it, but the French method this follows is built on butter. Figure 2 to 3 tablespoons for the quantity of peas given below, with the peas turned in it before the lid goes on.
- Working proportionsAbout 2 lb peas in the pod (roughly 2 cups shelled), the heart of one head of Boston or butter lettuce shredded fine, and 4 to 6 small onions or a bunch of scallions, chopped. Salt at the end; a pinch of sugar is traditional with older peas.
- "Little onions"Here this most likely means spring onions or small white boiling onions rather than a chopped storage onion. Scallions, including a good part of the green, are the closest common substitute and stay sweet in the short cooking.
- TimingFresh young peas want 8 to 12 minutes covered over low heat; older, starchier ones up to 20. Frozen peas need 3 to 4 minutes and should go in after the lettuce and onion have softened, or they collapse.
- Lettuce textureShred it finely across the leaf. Left in wide pieces it goes slippery and stringy rather than melting into the peas.
- YieldServes four as a side dish.
The dish is the American dining-room version of petits pois à la française, peas smothered with lettuce and small onions, a preparation long standard in French cookery and carried into New York restaurant kitchens by French-trained chefs. The attribution matters more than the instructions here: Sherry's, Louis Sherry's restaurant on Fifth Avenue, was one of the two or three most fashionable dining rooms in the city around the turn of the century, the rival and neighbor of Delmonico's. Community cookbooks of this period are often said to include such borrowings, a contributor reporting how a dish was done at a celebrated house and offering it to her neighbors in a few lines.