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Peas with Lettuce
1 quart peas 2 tablespoons butter 1 head lettuce 1 small onion 1 teaspoon sugar 1/2 gill water Put all the ingredients in a saucepan, using only the heart of the lettuce, cover, and cook for five minutes, tossing the vegetables several times. Now draw the pan back where the contents will simmer slowly for half an hour.
A version of the French braise of peas with lettuce, written for a coal range. Two things need translating: the measures, and the cooking time, which assumes peas far starchier than anything sold today.
- A quart of peasThat means shelled peas, roughly 1 1/4 lb, which takes about 3 lb of peas in the pod. Two 10-oz bags of frozen peas come to about the same volume.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup — 4 tablespoons. It is meant to be barely any liquid; the lettuce and peas release the rest.
- "Draw the pan back"On a range, this meant sliding the pan to a cooler part of the top. On a modern hob it is the lowest setting with the lid on, or a heat diffuser if your smallest burner still runs hot.
- The half hourLong cooking of this kind suits peas that are older and starchier than most of what is sold now. Fresh young peas are tender in 8-10 minutes and frozen peas in 3-4; hold to the full thirty and you get grey mush.
- The heart of the lettuceUse the tight pale centre of a butterhead or romaine, quartered or shredded. The outer leaves are watery and go slimy — save them for something else.
- The onionThe recipe calls only for one small onion and gives no further instruction; left whole it flavours the pot and can be lifted out before serving. Spring onions or a few pearl onions, left in, are a common alternative.
- Butter and the finishTwo tablespoons is the whole sauce. If the pan looks watery at the end, lift out the vegetables, boil the liquid down hard for a minute, and pour it back.
- YieldA quart of peas serves four to six as a side dish.
This is petits pois à la française in plain English: peas smothered with lettuce, a little onion, butter and almost no water, so they steam in their own moisture. The method is well established in nineteenth-century French cookery and passed into English and American books largely unchanged, which may be why it appears here with no name and no explanation.