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New Peas
Peas should be cooked as soon after picking as possible. If the peas are gritty, wash before shelling. Place in boiling water, enough to half cover; cook in an uncovered dish for 20 minutes or until tender. Add salt the last 10 minutes of cooking. Let the water reduce until there is just enough to moisten the peas; add the butter and serve hot. To one quart of cooked peas, use one-half teaspoon salt, one-sixteenth teaspoon pepper, and two tablespoons of butter. Two or three tablespoons of cream may be substituted for the butter. Serves 8 to 10.
A plain treatment of shelled garden peas from an era when they came out of the pod rather than the freezer. The one thing worth overturning is the cooking time.
- Cut the time drasticallyTwenty minutes was written for field-run peas that might be days off the vine and starchy. Young shelled peas, and any frozen ones, are done in 3 to 5 minutes; taste at three and stop when they are just tender.
- Why the pan is left uncoveredThe usual explanation is that acids driven off by open boiling keep green vegetables from turning drab olive. Whatever the size of that effect, with a short cook time it matters much less than it did over twenty minutes.
- QuantitiesA quart of peas is roughly 1 1/4 lb shelled, which means about 3 lb of peas in the pod, or a pound and a quarter of frozen. The seasoning given works out to 1/2 teaspoon salt, a pinch of pepper and 2 tablespoons butter for that amount.
- Salt timingThe recipe holds the salt until "the last 10 minutes" without saying why; late salting was often advised on the grounds that early salt toughens skins. With a five-minute cook, salt the water at the start and season again at the end.
- Reducing the waterHalf-covering rather than flooding the peas, then letting the liquid boil down to a glaze, is the useful idea here. Do not drain the pan; the reduced cooking water carries the sweetness back into the peas with the butter.
- The cream optionTwo or three tablespoons of cream in place of butter gives creamed peas. Add it off the heat with the pan liquid nearly gone, and warm through without boiling.
- YieldEight to ten servings assumes a small side portion alongside several other dishes. Reckon on four to six as a modern vegetable side.
Peas were the vegetable that most sharply marked the calendar in American and English kitchens: the crop comes in over a few weeks in early summer, and the sugars in the seed begin converting to starch within hours of picking, which is why the instruction here is to cook them as soon after picking as possible. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household books repeat the same short list of rules for them, along with the open-pan boiling meant to preserve colour. Quick-frozen vegetables reached American shops from the 1930s, and their spread eventually broke the link between the dish and the month.