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Green Peas
Peas, like corn, lose their sweetness very quickly after picking. If necessary to keep them over night, they should be spread out on a cloth on a cool cellar floor. If, however, you should be so unfortunate as to get stale or wilted peas, they should be shelled at once, thrown into cold water at least one hour before cooking, and then a teaspoonful of sugar should be added to the water in which they are boiled. This artificial flavoring will only partly restore the flavor of the peas. Fresh peas, however, should not be shelled until just before cooking. They should then be washed quickly in cold water, thrown in a kettle of salted boiling water, and boiled ten or fifteen minutes. Long boiling cracks the skins and destroys the color and flavor of the peas. When tender, drain, turn into a hot dish, add a lump of butter. Dust with salt and pepper and serve at once.
The most important point in cooking peas is to have plenty of water. The water must be slightly salted and the peas boiled just long enough to become tender, and drained at once. In this way they will retain their color and sweetness. There are many varieties of peas, many of which are coarse and only fit for drying. The choice kinds of garden peas are, of course, sweet, nutritious and wholesome. There is also a kind of pea called sugar pea, the pods of which are gathered young and cooked and eaten with the seeds in, the same way as we use string beans. Boiled, and dressed with butter, salt and pepper, they are delicious.
If peas are old or have been picked some time before cooking, it is very difficult to make them tender. Indeed, the longer they are boiled, the harder they become. In this condition they are not digestible. It is best to save them for another meal, and by pressing them through a sieve they may be made into a palatable and digestible soup.
A method built entirely around the sugar-to-starch clock in a freshly picked pea. The advice holds, but the timings assume garden peas of uncertain age rather than the small, uniform peas most cooks buy now.
- The hinge: plenty of water, brieflyA large volume of boiling salted water keeps the temperature from dropping when the peas go in, so they cook fast and stay green. Crowding a small pan, like over-boiling, can leave you with grey, split peas.
- Ten to fifteen minutes is long by today's standardsModern shelling peas, and anything frozen, are tender in three to five minutes. Reserve the longer end of the range for large, late-season pods with a visible starchy bloom on the seed.
- Frozen peas are the honest substitutePeas are frozen within hours of picking, which is precisely the problem this recipe is trying to solve. They need only to be heated through, a minute or two, then drained and buttered.
- Sugar in the waterThe teaspoon of sugar compensates for sugars already converted to starch. It flatters the flavour without restoring texture, and the author is right that it only partly works.
- Sugar pea means mangetoutAn edible-podded pea eaten whole, of the type sold now as snow peas or mangetout. Two to three minutes in boiling water, or a quick saute.
- Salting and drainingSalt the water as you would for pasta, about a tablespoon per four litres. Drain the instant they are tender and dress immediately; peas sitting in their own steam keep cooking.
- YieldRoughly 1 lb of pods in shell gives a cup of shelled peas, enough for two as a side. Reckon 1 lb pods per person for a generous serving.
- The soup fallbackSound advice for tough peas. Cook them until soft, then sieve or blend; the starch that ruined them boiled will thicken the soup.
Green peas eaten fresh rather than dried were long a luxury of the short early-summer weeks, and the seventeenth-century French court's enthusiasm for petits pois is often cited as the moment they became fashionable food rather than famine insurance. The dried field pea, the "coarse" sort this writer dismisses, was for centuries the more important crop: pease pottage and split-pea soup fed households year round. The anxiety running through this entry, that peas must be shelled at the last moment and eaten the same day, belongs to a period when a home garden or a nearby market was the only source. Commercial freezing, which arrived in the decades after this book, effectively solved the problem the recipe spends most of its length worrying about.