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Peas
Cook peas in boiling water. Use just enough water to keep them from burning. Add salt fifteen minutes before taking them from the fire. Season with butter and pepper.
Peas may be used for croquettes or may be used with white sauce and served in croustade cases.
Equal quantities of chopped carrots and peas served together are delicious.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in early twentieth-century books, where the writer assumes you already know what a pea should look like when done. The useful detail is the water: barely any, so the peas steam in their own sweetness rather than leaching it into a pot of boiling water you then pour away.
- How little water"Just enough to keep them from burning" implies no more than a shallow film in the bottom of the pan, kept covered so the peas part-steam. Shelled peas give up a little of their own moisture; the aim is a glaze at the end, not a broth.
- Timing, and why fifteen minutes is too longSalting fifteen minutes before the end implies a total cooking time well over fifteen minutes, which suits garden peas picked mature and starchy. Freshly shelled young peas need 4-8 minutes, and frozen peas 2-3 from the bag. Salt at the start or the finish; on this timescale it makes no practical difference.
- Sugar in the peaPeas convert sugar to starch within hours of picking. Frozen peas are blanched soon after harvest and are often sweeter than "fresh" pods that have sat in a shop. Choose pods that are firm with small peas inside.
- Croustade casesHollowed rounds of bread, fried or oven-crisped until they hold their shape, used as edible cups. Puff pastry vol-au-vent shells are the closest ready-made substitute.
- White sauceThe recipe gives none here. A plain thin white sauce is 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour and 1 cup milk, seasoned; a stiffer sauce uses 2 tablespoons of each. About a cup of sauce carries two cups of peas without drowning them.
- CroquettesPeas alone will not bind. The period method is to mash them into a very thick white sauce or duchesse potato, chill the mixture until firm, then shape, crumb and fry. Skipping the chilling is why croquettes burst.
- Peas and carrotsEqual quantities by volume, with the carrots cut small and started several minutes ahead of the peas, since diced carrot needs 8-10 minutes and the peas need a fraction of that.
- YieldA pound of peas in the pod yields roughly a cup shelled, one modest serving. For four people, plan on 3-4 lb of pods or a pound of frozen peas.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and compiled by Maria Willett Howard. The treatment reflects the New England domestic-science school of the period, in which vegetables were commonly boiled, buttered and dressed up with white sauce or pastry cases. The croustade and the croquette were familiar ways of promoting a humble vegetable to something fit for a course of its own.