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Green Peas
Fresh peas should not be shelled until just before the time of cooking; then wash them quickly in cold water, drain, throw into a kettle of boiling water, add a teaspoonful of salt to harden the water. This will prevent the skins from cracking. Boil rapidly from ten to twenty minutes. After they have been boiling ten minutes, take out one or two and press with a fork; if they mash easily they are done. Drain, turn into a hot dish, add a lump of butter the size of a walnut, and serve.
The great point in cooking peas is to have plenty of water, boil rapidly and drain as soon as they are done. Peas cooked in this way will retain their color and sweetness. RADISHES (Blot) Cut off the roots close to the radish. Cut off the tops about an inch from the radish. Wash clean in cold water. Take the radish with the left hand, holding it by the top; cut the skin from the top downwards, in several parts, like you cut an orange to remove the skin, without detaching it. Do the same carefully with the body of the radish, and it will look more like a rose than a radish. After having prepared two or three it will be comparatively easy. The centre leaves must be eaten as well as the body of the radish; they contain a substance that helps the digestion of the radish itself.
SUMMER SQUASH (BOILED) Pare and cut in slices three summer squashes, remove the seeds, and cut the slices in squares. Put them into a saucepan, cover with boiling water, add a teaspoonful of salt, and boil twenty minutes. When done, drain in a colander and press gently; then mash fine, turn into a strainer cloth, and squeeze until the squash is dry. Now put into a small saucepan a tablespoonful of butter and the squash, add salt and pepper to taste, stir until thoroughly heated, and serve. SUMMER SQUASH (FRIED) Pare, and cut into slices, dust with salt and pepper, dip first in egg and then in bread crumbs and fry in smoking hot fat. Serve the same as Fried Egg-Plant.
SUMMER SQUASH (STEWED) Pare, and cut in strips or eighths, throw into a kettle of boiling salted water and boil rapidly for twenty minutes; drain, lift carefully, without breaking, on to a heated dish, and pour over it Cream Sauce.
SUMMER SQUASH (STUFFED) Prepare and cook precisely the same as Stuffed Egg-Plant. BAKED TOMATOES No.
I Choose six large, smooth tomatoes. Cut a slice off the stem ends, and with your finger carefully scoop out the seeds. Mix together a half cup of finely chopped, cold, boiled ham, twelve chopped mushrooms, two heaping tablespoonfuls of stale bread crumbs, a tablespoonful of chopped parsley, a half teaspoonful of salt, a dash of cayenne, and a tablespoonful of melted butter. Fill the tomatoes with this mixture, heaping it in the centre; sprinkle over the tops with bread crumbs; place the tomatoes in a granite baking pan, baste with melted butter, and bake in a hot oven thirty minutes. When done, take them up carefully with a cake turner, and serve BAKED TOMATOES No.
No. 2 Take one quart of fresh, round, ripe tomatoes, put into a deep dish and season with salt and pepper. Bake in a quick oven thirty minutes. When done, lift carefully with a cake turner and place on a heated dish. Serve very hot.
A cluster of summer vegetable recipes from the era of long boiling. The peas and squash timings are the main things to overturn; the tomatoes need only an oven number.
- Boil the peas far lessTen to twenty minutes will reduce modern shelled peas to grey mush. Fresh young peas need 2 to 4 minutes in rapidly boiling water; frozen peas need barely 2. Start testing at 2 minutes rather than at 10.
- The salt does not "harden the water"Salt seasons the peas and raises the boiling point negligibly; it does not toughen the skins or stop them splitting. What does keep peas whole and green is exactly what the recipe then prescribes — plenty of water at a hard boil, and immediate draining.
- Peas were older thenPeas were probably older then -- market peas in the nineteenth century were often larger and starchier, days from the vine, which may be why the book allows up to twenty minutes. Anything sold as a shelling pea today, or frozen at harvest, is sweeter and softer and cooks in a fraction of the time.
- "Butter the size of a walnut"About a tablespoon, or 15 g. "The size of a walnut" was a common informal way of specifying a small lump of butter.
- Oven temperaturesA hot or quick oven in this period is usually glossed as roughly 400-450F. Both baked tomato recipes want that heat; thirty minutes at 425F suits the stuffed tomatoes, though whole ones (No. 2) are likely to collapse before thirty minutes and are better checked at fifteen.
- Boiled squash: the squeezing is the pointSummer squash is around 95 percent water, and twenty minutes of boiling leaves it waterlogged. The strainer cloth and hard squeeze are what turn it from soup into a purée. If you would rather not boil it at all, the same result comes from salting the slices and cooking them dry in the butter.
- Stewed squash needs less timeTwenty minutes of rapid boiling will not leave strips intact to "lift carefully, without breaking." Six to eight minutes gives tender pieces that still hold their shape under cream sauce.
- Radishes and the cross-referencesThe radish entry is knife work, not cooking; a firm globe radish and a sharp paring knife are all it requires. Note that the radish-leaf digestion claim is period folklore. Two of the squash recipes send you to Fried and Stuffed Egg-Plant elsewhere in the book -- for the fried slices, fat at about 375F; for the stuffed version you will need the book's own egg-plant directions, which are not on this page.
- YieldThree summer squashes serve four as a side dish; a quart of tomatoes serves four to six; allow a pound of unshelled peas per two people, which yields roughly a cup shelled.
These entries belong to the late-nineteenth-century American summer table, when vegetables were seasonal in the literal sense and a book of "hot weather dishes" existed to steer cooks away from heavy roasts toward what the garden and market wagon offered in July. The insistence on shelling peas at the last moment reflects a real problem: peas convert sugar to starch quickly after picking, and before refrigerated transport the difference between a morning pea and an afternoon one was plain on the plate. The radish instruction is credited to Blot — Pierre Blot, the French-born cooking teacher and author who ran a cookery school in New York in the 1860s and whose work was widely quoted by later American compilers. The "granite baking pan" for the tomatoes is graniteware, the speckled enamel-on-steel ware that spread through American kitchens after the 1870s and was prized because, unlike bare iron, it did not blacken acidic foods like tomatoes.