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Peas with Cream Sauce
Put one quart of peas in a kettle of salted, boiling water and cook fifteen minutes; drain. Put a tablespoonful of butter in a saucepan, add a tablespoonful of flour, mix. Add a half pint of milk, stir continually until boiling; add a half teaspoonful of salt, a dash of pepper and then the peas. Stand over boiling water about five minutes and serve as a garnish to baked, broiled or fried sweetbreads or squabs.
A plain white sauce folded through boiled peas, written when peas were shelled fresh and cooked far longer than we would now.
- A quart of peasThat is a quart (4 cups) of shelled peas, something over a pound, which means roughly 2 1/2 to 3 lb of peas in the pod. A pound of frozen peas is the practical stand-in.
- Fifteen minutes is too longLong boiling of this kind suited older, larger, starchier peas. Modern sweet varieties and frozen peas are done in 2 to 4 minutes; beyond that they turn grey-green and mealy.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. With a tablespoon each of butter and flour this gives a thin white sauce that coats rather than clings, which is what a garnish sauce should do.
- Cook the roux brieflyMix the butter and flour and let it bubble half a minute before the milk goes in, or the sauce tastes of raw flour. Add the milk gradually and stir until it boils and thickens.
- "Stand over boiling water"A double boiler, used here only to hold the dish hot without scorching the milk. Five minutes is a holding time, not further cooking; a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water does the same.
- Sweetbreads and squabsBoth are special-order items now. The peas sit just as well beside roast chicken, veal, or a piece of white fish.
- YieldEnough garnish for six, or a side dish for four.
Creamed peas belong to the great age of the white sauce, when American and English cookery schools taught butter, flour and milk in fixed proportions as the foundation of dozens of dishes. Books of this kind treated the sauce as a technique to be learned once and applied everywhere, which is why the instructions here are so terse. The pairing with sweetbreads and squab places the dish in formal service: both were standard entree meats on hotel and dinner-party menus around 1900, and pale green peas in cream were a conventional garnish for pale meats. Peas were among the vegetables canned commercially on a large scale fairly early in the United States, and cookbooks of the era often assumed either a garden glut in June or a tin on the shelf the rest of the year.