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Sugar Pea Pods
Select young, tender pods, wash them in cold water, throw them in a kettle of boiling water, add a teaspoonful of salt and boil thirty minutes. Drain, turn into a heated dish, pour over Cream Sauce and serve; or they may be served with butter, salt and pepper.
These are also nice boiled and put with mixed pickles.
A straightforward boiled vegetable, but the timing belongs to an era when green vegetables were cooked until they surrendered. Everything else in the recipe holds up.
- The thirty minutesSnow peas and sugar snaps need two to four minutes in boiling water — five at the outside for thick snaps. Thirty minutes yields olive-drab, collapsed pods with no sweetness left. This is the one instruction to ignore outright.
- Why the old timing existedPea pods of the period were often stringier and tougher-skinned than modern cultivars, and cooks were taught to boil vegetables to complete softness. Contemporary sugar snap and snow pea varieties are bred tender and are pleasant even raw.
- StringsSnap the stem end and pull the string down the straight seam before cooking. Most snow peas need it; many modern sugar snaps are stringless, but check one or two from the batch.
- Salt the water properlyA teaspoon in a whole kettle is thin seasoning. Use roughly a tablespoon per four quarts, and cook the pods in a generous volume of hard-boiling water so the temperature does not crash when they go in.
- Cream SauceThe recipe points to a cream sauce given elsewhere in the book; period cream sauces of this kind are a plain white sauce built on roughly equal butter and flour with milk or cream, seasoned simply. Have it made and warm before the peas go into the water — the peas will not wait.
- Draining and holdingDrain immediately and either serve at once or shock in ice water to fix the colour, then reheat briefly in butter. Residual heat will continue to cook drained pods sitting in a hot dish.
- The pickle suggestionBlanched pods added to mixed pickles are a refrigerator preparation, not a shelf-stable one. Keep them cold and eat within a few days; the recipe gives no acidity or processing figures for canning.
- YieldAllow about a quarter pound of pods per person, so a pound serves four as a side dish.
Edible-podded peas — snow peas, mangetout, sugar peas — have been grown in Europe since at least the sixteenth century and appear in American kitchen gardens through the nineteenth. The name "sugar pea" is generally taken to point to the sweetness of the pod itself rather than the seed; unlike shelling peas, whose pods carry a tough parchment layer, these varieties lack it and can be eaten whole. The habit of finishing nearly everything with cream sauce is very much of its moment — white sauce was a standard dressing for boiled vegetables in the domestic-science era, taught in cooking schools as a fundamental preparation to be applied broadly. The suggestion to add the boiled pods to mixed pickles reflects a household economy in which nothing tender and seasonal went to waste.