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Some Kitchen Kinks: Dried
Puree of Dried or Split Peas.- Soak one quart of dried peas over night and follow the directions for purée of dried beans.
Sugar Peas. The green pods of the sugar pea may be prepared like string beans.
Gather the pods while the seeds are still very small. String them like beans and cut into two or three lengths. Cover with boiling water and boil gently until tender. If they are young and fresh they will cook in twenty-five or thirty minutes.
Pour off some of the water, which will serve for soup. Season with salt and butter and serve at once. When the pods are fresh and tender they have an exquisite flavor. When the seeds have grown large and the pods become tough they may be shelled and cooked like any other variety of peas.
Two related notes: a purée made from dried peas, and the edible-podded "sugar pea" treated as a fresh vegetable. Only one instruction here really needs overturning.
- The boiling time is the problemTwenty-five to thirty minutes will reduce a modern snow pea or sugar snap to grey string. Edible pods want two to four minutes in boiling salted water, or a fast sauté, and should still squeak when bitten. Why the original allows so long is unclear; the text itself specifies young, freshly gathered pods.
- "Sugar pea" todayThis is the edible-podded pea, sold now as snow pea or mangetout, with the sugar snap as a later, plumper relation. Both are bred for tenderness, but the recipe's caution about gathering them while the seeds are tiny still holds: pods left too long go fibrous.
- A quart of dried peasMeasured by volume, roughly 1 3/4 lb, which will yield a very large quantity of purée — enough for eight or more as a soup course. Halve it unless you are cooking for a crowd.
- Overnight soakingWhole dried peas benefit from it; split peas do not need it at all and will collapse into purée in 45 minutes to an hour of simmering without any soak.
- The cross-referenceThe directions for purée of dried beans are not given here; the standard method of the period was to simmer until entirely soft, press through a sieve, thin with the cooking liquid or stock, and finish with butter, salt and pepper. A blender or food mill replaces the sieve.
- Save the cooking waterThe instruction to pour off some of the pod water for soup is sound and worth keeping. Pod liquor carries a good deal of the sweetness, and it makes a better base for a pea soup than plain water.
- StringingOlder podded varieties needed the fibrous seam pulled off both edges. Most snow peas sold now need only the stem end snapped and the string tugged from one side, if that.
The edible-podded pea is generally said to have been grown in European kitchen gardens for centuries, and it has gone by various English names as well as by the French mange-tout — "eat it all" — the name that eventually stuck in Britain. The distinction the passage draws, between pods young enough to eat whole and pods gone tough enough to shell, is the practical logic of a household with a garden rather than a greengrocer: one planting served two purposes depending on when you got to it. That the entry sits beside a pur\. A book like this assumed the same legume in three states — fresh in the pod, fresh shelled, and dried for winter — and expected the cook to know which treatment each wanted.