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Vegetables, or Légumes, and Salads. 149: Petits
Petits pois à l'Anglaise are boiled, and served on a lump of butter. à la Française are stewed, and mixed with flour and butter. à la Parisienne-boiled with onions, butter, sugar, etc., and served with the sauce. au jus-stewed in stock. aux laitues-stewed with lettuces.
Petits pois à l'ancienne mode-stewed, and served with cream and yolk of egg. à la Vénitienne are served in an onion sauce, garnished with slices of tomatoes. en cosses are boiled in their shells.
They are also served au lard-stewed in stock with dice of bacon, etc.; or au jambon with dice of ham, young onions, etc.
Crème à la D'Artois is a cream of green peas.
Ten ways with young peas, in a vegetable course that stood on its own. Almost every elaboration here exists to solve a problem that a freezer has already solved.
- Frozen peas invert the pagePeas lose their sugar within hours of picking, and that is what this page is up against: by the time garden peas reached the kitchen they needed onions, sugar, cream, lettuce or stock to be worth eating. Peas picked and frozen within hours of harvest are sweeter than anything available to this cook unless the row was outside the door. The humblest option now gives the best result.
- The added sugar is a clueÀ la Parisienne — boiled with onions, butter, sugar. Sugar goes in because the peas have lost their own. With modern petits pois it is unnecessary and makes them cloying, so leave it out and keep the onion and butter, which are doing real work.
- The plainest entry is the English oneÀ l’Anglaise are boiled, and served on a lump of butter. The pea is put on top of butter in the dish and stirred at the table. It is the shortest line on the page and the one a modern cook should choose.
- Two halves of one French braiseÀ la Française is stewed and bound with flour and butter; aux laitues is stewed with lettuces. Listed apart, they describe between them the elements of the braise of peas with lettuce and onion that is still cooked in France: very little liquid, long and slow, the lettuce collapsing into the sauce.
- Cream and yolk will scrambleÀ l’ancienne mode is finished with cream and yolk of egg. This is a liaison, and it must go in off the heat and must not boil afterwards, or the yolk sets in threads. The page does not warn you because it is not speaking to the person at the stove.
- En cossesPeas boiled in their pods. The page says no more than that, and does not say whether the pods were eaten or opened at the table, so it is not clear what the diner was expected to do. It is not mangetout, which is a different vegetable bred for a tender pod.
A page of this length about one vegetable tells you there was a garden and somebody employed to work it. Peas come in for a few weeks and then stop, and the kitchen that grew its own faced a glut followed by nothing, which is why the book can list ten treatments and expect them all to be used. It also tells you that vegetables arrived as a course of their own, sent in after the roast rather than placed beside it, so a dish of peas was something a diner sat down to and looked at. Once vegetables became a garnish on the same plate as the meat, there was no room left for nine of these ten dishes.