Home › Meat Substitutes › Asparagus with Green Peas
Asparagus with Green Peas
1 pint cut asparagus 1/2 pint green peas Water to cover well 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon sugar 1 tablespoon butter 1/4 cup cream Select peas as tender and fresh as possible, as peas lose their sweetness after being gathered. Cook in boiling, salted water. The asparagus should be crisp and tender. If somewhat wilted, throw into cold water for a half hour or so. Remove the scales, and wash thoroughly by dashing up and down in several waters to make sure that all sand is removed. Cut into half-inch lengths, and cook in enough boiling, salted water to cover well. When both are tender, mix the vegetables and add the butter and cream for seasoning. They are also delicious without the cream.
A two-vegetable side dish that lives or dies by timing: the original assumes you will boil both until "tender," which by modern standards means brief cooking, not the long simmer the word once implied.
- The measurementsA pint here is a volume of prepared vegetable, not a weight: 2 cups of asparagus cut into half-inch lengths, which takes somewhere around three-quarters of a pound of trimmed spears. Half a pint of shelled peas is 1 cup, which needs roughly 1 lb of peas in the pod.
- Cook them separately, brieflyThe recipe cooks each vegetable in its own pot for good reason, since they finish at different times. Cut asparagus takes 3 to 5 minutes in boiling salted water; shelled young peas take 3 to 5 as well, older ones a few minutes more. Drain both well before combining or the cream will thin into a puddle.
- Where the sugar goesThe recipe says only 'boiling, salted water' and never states where the teaspoon of sugar belongs; the likeliest reading is that both salt and sugar go into the cooking water rather than the finished dish. The sugar would then be compensation for peas that have been off the vine a day or two and lost sweetness to starch, the problem the recipe itself notes.
- Frozen peasFrozen peas are blanched and frozen within hours of picking and are sweeter than most fresh peas at a supermarket. If you use them, they need only a minute or two and no added sugar.
- Trimming the asparagus"Remove the scales" means the small triangular bracts along the stalk, which trap grit; a vegetable peeler or a quick scrape handles them on thick spears, and thin ones can be left alone. The cold-water soak genuinely does revive limp stalks, which draw water back up the cut end.
- FinishingAdd the tablespoon of butter and quarter cup of cream off the heat, or warm the cream separately and pour it over. Hard boiling gains nothing here and can dull the colour of the vegetables.
- YieldAbout three cups of cooked vegetable, serving four as a side, or two if it is standing in as the main dish.
The recipe is a plain pairing of two short-season spring vegetables. Meatless and 'meat substitute' cookery had a wide audience in the English-speaking world in the early twentieth century, pushed both by vegetarian and health-reform movements and by wartime food-conservation campaigns urging households to spare meat. Fresh green peas and asparagus were both limited to a few weeks of the year in that era, and combining them made for a more substantial dish. The observation that peas 'lose their sweetness after being gathered' is sound: pea sugars begin converting to starch soon after picking, which is the kind of thing that matters most in a kitchen supplied by a garden or a morning market.