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Sugar Peas
Sugar peas may be cooked in the pods like string beans. Gather the pods while the seeds are still very small; string like beans and cut into pieces. Cover with boiling water and boil gently for twenty-five or thirty minutes or until tender. Pour off most of the water, saving it for soup; season the rest with salt and butter and serve.
A straightforward treatment of edible-podded peas, with one instruction that no modern cook should follow: the boiling time.
- Twenty-five minutes is far too longEdible-podded peas need two to four minutes in boiling salted water, five at most for older, tougher pods. Half an hour reduces them to grey strings. The long time in the original is in keeping with the period's habit of cooking vegetables well past tenderness.
- What "sugar peas" meansThese are the flat-podded, edible-pod peas sold now as snow peas or mangetout, and the rounder sugar snap is a modern relative of the same type. Ordinary shelling peas will not work: their pods have a tough parchment lining.
- StringingThe instruction still holds for older varieties. Snap the stem end and pull the string down the straight edge, then the other side if it resists. Many current supermarket snow peas are nearly stringless and need only the stem tip removed.
- CuttingCut into pieces on the diagonal, an inch or so, or leave whole if the pods are small. Cutting is more useful for large pods that have started to fill out.
- The cooking waterSaving it for soup is sound and worth doing, but salt it lightly if you plan to reduce it later. Peas give up a good deal of sweetness to the water.
- FinishingDrain well before adding butter, or the seasoning slides off. A few seconds back in the dry hot pan drives off surface moisture.
- YieldThe original gives none. Reckon on about a pound of pods for four as a side dish.
Edible-podded peas were grown in European kitchen gardens long before they became a supermarket staple, and English and American seed catalogues listed them under several names, including sugar pea and the French borrowing mangetout, literally "eat-all," a name that distinguishes them from peas whose pods are thrown away. The instruction here suggests a home-garden context: a household with a row of sugar peas needed to be told what to do with the pods when the seeds inside were still too small to shell, and the answer was to treat them as one already treated string beans. The long boil is characteristic of the period's vegetable cookery generally, as is the frugal instruction to keep the pot liquor for soup.