Home › Vegetable Recipes › Peas En Casserole
Peas En Casserole
2 quarts shelled peas Small bunch parsley 12 tiny white onions I/2 pint (I cup) water 3 heaping tablespoonfuls (3 ozs.) butter 1/2 teaspoonful powdered mint Salt and pepper to taste Peel the onions and put them into a casserole, add the peas, butter, mint, water, parsley, salt, and pepper. Cover and simmer for one hour.
Remove the parsley and serve hot.
A French-style braise of peas and onions that assumes peas picked hours earlier and eaten soft rather than crisp. Two adjustments carry the whole dish: the pot and the clock.
- "Casserole" hereThe instruction to cover and simmer points to a lidded earthenware or flameproof pot used directly over the heat, not a baking dish. A heavy Dutch oven or any flameproof pot with a tight lid does the same work.
- Quantity of peasTwo quarts of shelled peas is about 8 cups, roughly 2 1/2 lb shelled, which means somewhere around 5-6 lb of peas in the pod. Two 1-lb bags of frozen peas is the practical equivalent.
- The hour of simmeringThis is the instruction to reconsider. An hour suited large, starchy, mature garden peas of the period; modern sugar-snap-bred or frozen peas turn grey and mushy in twenty minutes. Give the onions a head start in the butter and water, then add the peas for the last 8-10 minutes.
- Tiny white onionsPearl or button onions. Frozen peeled pearl onions save the peeling; if using fresh, drop them in boiling water for a minute and the skins slip off.
- Butter and waterThree ounces of butter to one cup of water is a small amount of liquid for this quantity of peas, so the result is buttery rather than brothy. Keep the lid on and the heat low so it does not boil dry.
- Powdered mintDried mint ground fine. A half teaspoon of dried mint works; with fresh, use about a tablespoon chopped and add it at the end, since long cooking flattens it.
- Parsley bunchTying the stems with string makes the whole bundle easy to lift out, since the recipe has you remove the parsley before serving.
- YieldServes six to eight as a side dish.
This is the English-language cookbook version of French petits pois à la française — peas smothered with butter, small onions and a herb bundle, with barely enough water to keep them from catching. Casserole cookery — slow cooking in a heavy lidded pot with little attention and little fuel — was widely promoted in English-language cookbooks, though nothing on this page fixes the date or origin of the volume it comes from. Mint with peas is a long-standing British pairing rather than a French one, so the recipe sits between two traditions: the French method of braising in butter, and the English habit of scenting green peas with mint. The scale is also a period marker — shelling several pounds of pods was ordinary kitchen labour when peas came from a garden or a greengrocer in the pod.