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To Cook Canned Peas
After opening the can drain the peas, throw them into cold water and drain again in a colander. Put them in a saucepan, and to each pint can allow one tablespoonful of butter, a half teaspoonful of salt and a dash of pepper. Shake gently until they are thoroughly hot and serve at once.
A three-minute side dish from the era when canning was still new enough to need its own instructions. The rinsing step is the whole point of the recipe.
- Why rinse at allThe packing liquor of early canned peas was salty and often carried a flat or tinny taste, and draining, rinsing in cold water and draining again removes it. Modern canned peas are milder but still benefit, and rinsing also lets you control the salt yourself.
- A pint canRoughly 15-16 oz by modern reckoning, near the standard can still on shelves. Drained weight is somewhere around 8 to 10 oz, which serves two to three as a side.
- Butter quantityOne tablespoon per can is a modest, workable amount. Add it off the heat if you would rather it stayed glossy than separating into oil.
- "Shake gently"Canned peas are already fully cooked and fragile. Shaking the pan rather than stirring keeps them whole; hard simmering will break them up.
- Heat, don't cookTwo to three minutes over medium heat is enough to warm them through. Adding no water is deliberate, though a tablespoon in a dry pan prevents scorching if your burner runs hot.
- Worth addingThe recipe is deliberately bare. A pinch of sugar restores sweetness lost in processing, and chopped mint or a squeeze of lemon at the end covers the flatness that canning leaves behind.
Household cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries devote real space to canned goods, and instructions like these exist to teach a specific skill: how to make a factory product taste like food. Commercial canning expanded rapidly in the United States after the Civil War, and peas were among the vegetables put up at scale early on, since fresh ones have a short season and go starchy within days of picking. Rinsing and draining turns up often enough in period advice to look like a common recommendation, partly on flavour grounds and partly because of anxiety about the packing liquid -- some of it well founded, given the copper salts once used to green dull peas and the lead solder in early can seams.