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Green Peas and Asparagus Tips
2 cups green peas. 1 cup asparagus tips. 1 cup cream sauce. 1/2 teaspoon minced parsley. Salt and pepper.
Boil peas and asparagus until tender, and serve with cream sauce. Garnish with parsley.
A plain side dish from the era when vegetables were boiled soft and sauced. Two adjustments — a defined cream sauce and much shorter cooking — bring it up to modern expectations.
- What "cream sauce" meantIn books of this period the term generally means a basic white sauce: roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. Milk rather than cream was the usual liquid, so the name points more to the texture than to the dairy.
- Cook the two separatelyPeas and asparagus tips do not finish at the same rate, and the recipe's single pot guarantees one is overdone. Give the tips 3 to 4 minutes in salted boiling water and shelled peas 3 to 5, then combine.
- "Until tender" is the trapRecipes of this date often meant a long boil, which turns peas grey and asparagus stringy. Cook until just yielding and still bright green, then drain well so the sauce is not thinned by cooking water.
- Frozen peas work betterUnless you have young peas fresh from the pod, frozen peas are sweeter than most fresh supermarket ones and need only 2 minutes. Two cups is roughly 2 lb of peas in the shell.
- Asparagus tipsUse the top 2 to 3 inches of thin or medium spears; about 1 lb of asparagus yields a cup of tips. Save the stalks for soup rather than boiling them with the tips.
- Season the sauce, not the platterSalt and pepper belong in the white sauce while it cooks, where they distribute. Add the parsley at the last moment so it stays green.
- YieldServes four as a side dish.
Mrs. Wilson wrote for American households during and just after the First World War and was a regular contributor to the Ladies' Home Journal; her vegetable chapter reflects a period when a white sauce was a standard way to turn a plain boiled vegetable into a dish worth sending to the table. The pairing of peas with asparagus tips is a spring combination: both are among the earliest vegetables of the season in the northeastern United States.