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Peas and Potatoes
1 pint shelled peas 1 pint new potatoes 1 1/2 cups milk 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon salt Cook the shelled peas the same as for green peas. Scrape the new potatoes, and cook in sufficient boiling, salted water to cover. When tender, drain and dry by shaking gently over the flame, and add the peas. Prepare white sauce of the milk, butter, flour and salt, and pour over the peas and potatoes. Cook a few moments before serving.
A plain creamed vegetable dish that depends entirely on the quality of the peas and the smoothness of the sauce. Two things need translating: the volume measures for vegetables, and the assumption that you already know how to make a white sauce.
- A pint of shelled peasVolume, not weight: about 2 cups, which is roughly 2 lb of peas in the pod. Frozen peas work and need only a few minutes.
- A pint of new potatoesAgain about 2 cups of small whole potatoes, roughly 1 lb. "New" means freshly dug and thin-skinned, which is why the recipe says scrape rather than peel — a paring knife or the back of a spoon takes the skin off in patches.
- Cook the peas "the same as for green peas"The direction points back to an earlier recipe in the book, which is not on this page; boiling salted water until just tender is the usual reading. Fresh young peas need only a few minutes.
- Drying the potatoesShaking the drained potatoes over the heat for half a minute drives off surface water so the sauce clings instead of thinning. This is the step most often skipped and the one that decides whether the dish is creamed or watery.
- The white sauceTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to 1 1/2 cups milk is on the thin side of a medium sauce. Cook the flour in the butter a minute or two before adding milk, then simmer long enough to lose any raw-flour taste — three minutes at least.
- "Cook a few moments before serving"Just long enough to heat through, over low heat. Held longer, the peas dull from bright green to olive and the potatoes begin to break up into the sauce.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt total is modest for this volume; taste the sauce before it goes on. Pepper and a scrape of nutmeg are period-appropriate additions the recipe leaves out.
- YieldFour servings as a side, or two to three as a main dish.
The white sauce is the standard binding of the period, taught in the cooking schools that shaped these books, and it appears over almost every vegetable in the genre. Peas and new potatoes come ready at the same point in early summer, which is reason enough for the pairing.