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Some Kitchen Kinks: Peas
Every locality produces some wild plants that are safe and pleasant to use as greens. It is important, however, that the wild greens shall be gathered by persons who are familiar with the plants.* PEAS Green Peas. This vegetable should be gathered when the seeds are about half grown, and it should be cooked as soon as possible after gathering. When the peas are thus young and tender they are best simply boiled and seasoned with salt and good butter. Some varieties of peas lack sweetness, and in this case a little sugar in the water in which they are cooked improves the flavor. Overcooking spoils the color and flavor of the vegetable. Peas should always be boiled slowly, and with the cover partially off the stewpan. It is impossible to give the exact time of cooking this vegetable, since so much depends upon the maturity of the peas, the length of time they have been picked, etc. Young, tender peas will generally cook in twenty or thirty minutes, and the seasoning should be added while they are still firm and crisp. If the peas are cooked until the green color of the chlorophyll is destroyed they are overdone and their delicate flavor is spoiled. When peas are overgrown and a little hard they should be cooked by the rule "Peas with pork."
When this rule is followed a pinch of delicate, small, white onions may be * For a discussion of wild plants used as pot herbs, see "Some Additions to our Vegetable Dietary," by F. V. Coville, U. S. Dept. Agr.
Yearbook 1895, p. 205. added to the peas and other ingredients and will give a very savory dish. Boiled Peas with Butter. -Put one quart of shelled peas in a stewpan and add enough boiling water to cover them generously. Place over a hot fire and when they begin to boil draw back where the water will bubble gently. Until the peas are done cook with the cover partially off the stewpan. When the peas are tender add one teaspoonful of salt and three tablespoonfuls of good butter. Cook ten minutes longer. If the peas are not the sweet kind add a teaspoonful of sugar with the salt and butter.
Peas with Pork. 1 quart peas. 4 ounces pork. 1 tablespoonful butter. 1 gill water (½ cupful). 2 small white onions. 1/8 teaspoonful pepper.
Cut pork into small bits. Put butter into stewpan and on the fire.
When the butter is melted add the pork and cook gently until a light brown, then add the water, peas, onion, and pepper. This is a good way to cook peas when they are a little old and hard.
Peas with Lettuce. 1 quart peas. 2 tablespoonfuls butter. 1 head lettuce the heart. 1 small onion. 1 teaspoonful sugar. 1/2 gill water.
Put all the ingredients into a stewpan, cover and place over the fire and cook for five minutes, tossing the vegetables several times. Now draw the pan back where the contents will simmer slowly for half an hour.
Three pea dishes and a short lecture on green vegetables. The instructions are sound in principle, but the timings belong to an era of garden peas that sat in the basket for a day before reaching the stove.
- The timing is the thingTwenty to thirty minutes will reduce modern peas — fresh-shelled or frozen — to grey mush. Young fresh peas need 3 to 5 minutes in simmering water; frozen peas need 2 to 3. The book's own test is the one to trust: stop while the color is still bright green and the peas still have bite.
- A gillA gill is half a cup, so the parenthetical "1½ cupful" in Peas with Pork is an error somewhere in the typesetting. Half a cup of water is the right amount for a quart of peas in a covered pan; the half gill in the lettuce recipe is a quarter cup, which is correct as written.
- Lid partly offThis is not fussiness. Volatile acids released by cooking greens will condense back into the water under a tight lid and dull the chlorophyll. Leaving the cover ajar, or off entirely for a short boil, keeps the color.
- The pork"Pork" here most likely means salt pork or fat back rather than fresh loin. Four ounces of it will season a quart of peas heavily, so hold the salt until you taste at the end. If you substitute bacon, expect a smoke note the original would not have had.
- No time given for Peas with PorkThe recipe stops after the ingredients go in the pan. Cover and simmer until the peas are tender — for genuinely starchy, overgrown peas that may be 20 minutes, which is precisely the case this method was written for. Young peas do not want this treatment.
- Two small white onionsRead this as boiling onions, roughly golf-ball size, peeled and left whole. A modern "small" yellow onion is several times larger and will take over the dish.
- Butter quantityThree tablespoons of butter for a quart of peas, then ten minutes further cooking, is generous by current taste and will overcook the peas besides. Drain the cooked peas and toss with 1 to 2 tablespoons off the heat instead.
- YieldA quart of shelled peas is about 3 lb in the pod, or roughly 1¼ to 1½ lb frozen. Each of these recipes serves four to six as a side.
Peas with Lettuce is the American plain-English version of petits pois à la française, in which peas braise in butter with shredded lettuce heart, small onions and barely any water — the lettuce collapses into the liquid and gives body and a faint sweetness. Peas with Pork belongs to a different and older tradition: the pea in Europe and colonial America was primarily a dried keeping crop, cooked long with salt pork. Fresh green peas were already a court luxury in France by the late seventeenth century, and became more widely available as sweeter garden varieties spread through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This page sits at the meeting point of the two, and gives the practical rule for deciding between them — young and sweet gets butter, old and starchy gets pork. The insistence on cooking peas "as soon as possible after gathering" reflects real chemistry: pea sugars convert to starch quickly after picking, which is exactly why commercially frozen peas, blanched within hours of harvest, are often sweeter than fresh ones from a shop. The footnote to Frederick Coville's 1895 Department of Agriculture yearbook essay on wild pot herbs is a reminder that this genre of household book saw itself as passing along government-backed science, not just kitchen lore.