Home › Chafing-Dish Dainties › Canned Peas with Egg
Canned Peas with Egg
Rinse, drain, and rinse again in boiling water one can of peas. Add two tablespoonfuls of butter, one teaspoonful of sugar, half a teaspoonful of salt and a dash of pepper. Beat the yolk of an
A chafing-dish standby from the era when canned peas were a luxury of convenience rather than a pantry afterthought. Note that the text breaks off mid-sentence — the egg yolk step is incomplete in the source.
- The missing endingThe recipe stops at "Beat the yolk of an" — almost certainly one egg yolk, beaten with a little cream or the pea liquor and stirred in off the heat to thicken. Treat what follows as your own judgment, not the author's.
- Egg yolk and heatIf you do finish it with a yolk, pull the pan from the flame first and stir it in with a few spoonfuls of hot liquid before returning it to low heat. A chafing dish over a direct spirit lamp will scramble a yolk in seconds.
- The double rinseRinsing, draining, and rinsing again in boiling water was most likely meant to wash off the metallic, brackish taste of early canned goods (and it warms the peas at the same time). Modern canned peas need one rinse in a colander at most; over-rinsing washes away what little flavor they have.
- One canPeriod can sizes for peas varied considerably, so no exact equivalence is possible. A modern 15-oz can, drained, is a reasonable substitute.
- Butter quantityTwo tablespoons for one can is generous by current habit and is doing most of the work here. Do not cut it back and expect the dish to taste like anything.
- Peas are already cookedCanned peas need warming through, nothing more — two or three minutes. Anything longer and they collapse into a gray mash.
- YieldServes two as a chafing-dish course, or four as a small vegetable alongside a roast.
Chafing-dish cookery had a long vogue in American middle-class homes from the 1890s into the 1920s, when a spirit lamp and a nickel-plated pan let a hostess cook at the table without a servant in sight. Commercially canned peas were widely available by the late nineteenth century and were among the first vegetables Americans accepted out of a tin, though the flavor of early canning left something to be desired — and the greening of peas with copper salts, a contested practice associated more with French canners, was fought over by Wiley and the pure-food men. This recipe, for its part, begins by rinsing the peas twice before anything else happens.