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Peas
Shell the peas; throw them into boiling water and let them boil slowly for five minutes. Add salt, pepper and butter. Place in cooker for two hours or more.
This is a fireless-cooker recipe: the peas are brought to the boil on the stove, then transferred to an insulated box that finishes them on stored heat. Almost everything about the method needs translating, and the timing needs ignoring.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated wooden or metal chest, packed with hay, felt or asbestos, into which a tightly lidded pot of boiling food was sealed. No further heat was added; the food coasted down slowly from near-boiling over several hours. A vacuum flask or a well-wrapped Dutch oven in a cooler is the nearest domestic equivalent.
- The two hours is the problemShelled garden peas are done in three to five minutes of boiling. Two hours at any temperature turns them grey-green, splits the skins and flattens the sugar into starchy blandness. The five-minute boil in the original is, on its own, a complete cooking method.
- Why the book asked for it anywayFuel economy, not texture, is the likeliest motive: getting the pot off the coal range so the fire could be banked, and having dinner components hot and waiting with no attention. If you are not economising on fuel, there is little reason to reproduce the second stage.
- Holding food hot for hoursAn insulated box has no thermostat, and a cooling pot of vegetables passes down through the range where Bacillus cereus and similar spore-formers multiply. Peas held this way should be eaten promptly and not held over, cooled and re-warmed later.
- Salt timingThe original salts after the boil begins, which is fine. Sugar helps more than salt with older or store-bought peas — a pinch in the water compensates for sugar that has already converted to starch after picking.
- Quantity and yieldNo amount is given, as was normal for a vegetable side. Reckon about 1 lb of peas in the pod per person, which yields roughly 1 cup shelled. Butter runs to roughly 1 tablespoon per pound shelled.
- Frozen peasCommercially frozen peas are generally blanched soon after picking and can be sweeter than fresh peas that have sat in a shop. They want boiling water and about two minutes, then draining, salt, pepper and butter — the same finish this recipe describes.
Fireless cookery was a genuine early twentieth-century enthusiasm, not a curiosity: home economists, extension bulletins and cookbooks between roughly 1905 and 1920 devoted whole chapters to insulated cookers, which were sold commercially and also built at home from a packing crate and hay. The appeal was fuel — a coal or wood range had to be fed all afternoon to hold a simmer, while a hay box held heat for nothing — and the movement gained further momentum during the First World War, when domestic fuel conservation became a patriotic argument. A separate Fireless Cookery section reflects that moment. Peas are an odd candidate for the method, since they need minutes rather than hours.