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Vegetables: Peas
Boiled Peas with Butter.
2 small white onions 1/2 cupful water 1/8 teaspoonful pepper 1/4 cupful water Put 1 quart shelled peas in a stewpan and add enough boiling water to cover them generously. When they begin to boil, draw back where the water will bubble gently. When tender, add 1 teaspoonful salt and 3 tablespoonfuls butter. Cook ten minutes longer. If the peas are not the sweet kind, add a teaspoonful sugar Peas with Pork. 1 quart peas, 1/4 ounces pork, 1 tablespoonful butter, cupful water, small white onions, teaspoonful pepper.
Cut pork into small bits. Put butter into stewpan; when it melts add the pork and cook gently until light brown, then add the water, peas, onion, and pepper. This is a good way to cook peas when they are old.
Peas with Lettuce (French recipe). 1 quart peas, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 head lettuce (the heart), 1 small onion, 1 teaspoonful sugar, 4 cupful water.
MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK Put the vegetables into a stewpan, cover, and cook for five minutes.
Draw the pan back where the contents will simmer slowly for half an hour, drain, season, and serve hot.
Sugar Peas in the Pod.
Gather the pods while the peas are very small. String them like beans and cut into two or three lengths.
Four short methods for shelled green peas, written for a coal range where a pan could be slid to a cooler spot. The timings assume mature, starchy garden peas rather than the sweet young ones sold today.
- The main adjustment: cooking timeModern shelled peas, whether fresh-picked or frozen, are tender in 3 to 5 minutes of gentle boiling. The recipe's "when tender, then cook ten minutes longer" will leave them grey and mealy. Add the salt and butter as soon as they are just tender and give them a minute more, no longer.
- "Draw back"On a wood or coal range the cook moved the pan away from the firebox to a cooler part of the top. On a gas or electric hob this means lowering the heat to a bare simmer with the surface just trembling.
- StewpanA shallow lidded saucepan with straight sides. Any 2- to 3-quart saucepan with a well-fitting lid does the work; for the lettuce recipe a lid is essential, since almost no liquid is used.
- Quantities and yieldA quart of shelled peas is roughly 1¼ lb, which takes something like 3 lb or more of peas in the pod. Each of these serves about four as a side dish.
- The water measure is garbledThe lettuce recipe's "4 cupful water" is almost certainly a lost fraction, ¼ or ½ cupful. Treat it as ¼ cup: the lettuce heart and onion release a good deal of moisture, and the point of the French method is to braise the peas rather than boil them.
- Peas with pork"4 ounces pork" probably means salt pork or fat belly rather than a lean modern cut; pancetta or unsmoked streaky bacon will stand in, and watch the salt, since the recipe seasons only with pepper. The recipe gives no cooking time — simmer covered until the small onions are tender, 15 to 25 minutes depending on the age of the peas.
- When the peas are oldThe recipe says only of the pork method that it is "a good way to cook peas when they are old": fat, aromatics and long gentle heat suit starchy end-of-season peas. If your peas are sweet and young, the plain buttered version is the one to use, and skip the sugar.
- Sugar peas in the podThis last entry breaks off mid-thought in the original. What survives is sound: pick the pods while the peas inside are barely formed, snap off the stem ends and any string, cut into two or three lengths, and boil briefly in salted water — 2 to 3 minutes for snow peas, 4 for a fatter sugar snap.
Green peas lent themselves to delicate treatment rather than being boiled into submission, and these four notes show the range of approaches available around 1900. The pork version is the older, plainer line of descent — peas cooked with a piece of salt pork in the pan is often said to be an English and American country habit, and the note that it suits old peas is the whole reason it is there. The lettuce recipe is labelled French because it is a version of petits pois à la française, the braise of peas with butter, a shredded lettuce heart and small onions, a dish of long standing in French cookery. The line reading "Mrs. Curtis's Cookbook" in the middle of the page is a running head from the cookbook itself; the sugar sprinkled in as an afterthought for peas that are "not the sweet kind" is a reminder that the reliably sugary varieties on sale now are a later achievement of seed breeding.