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Creamed Peas
Have ready one can of peas, drained, rinsed, covered with boiling water and drained again. Melt two tablespoonfuls of butter; add one tablespoonful of flour with one teaspoonful of sugar and half a teaspoonful of salt; add the peas and one-third a cup of milk, stir, and let cook until the liquid begins to bubble.
Purée of Fish.
Scald one quart of milk, with half an onion and a stalk of celery; strain into a pitcher and keep hot if convenient. Add to the remnants of cold boiled white fish enough canned salmon to make two cups; chop fine and rub through a purée sieve. Cook together in the blazer two tablespoonfuls of butter, three of flour, one teaspoonful of salt and a dash of pepper. Add the milk gradually, and, when all is added and the contents of the blazer are boiling, put a few spoonfuls of the sauce into the fish and beat until smooth; add more sauce, and, when well diluted and smooth, turn the whole into the blazer. Stir, and let cook until very hot; then serve with crackers, split, buttered, and browned in the oven. These proportions give three pints of soup. Vegetable purées may be prepared in the same way.
Salt Codfish with Tomato Sauce:
Sauté one clove of garlic and half an onion, grated or chopped fine, in three tablespoonfuls of
A chafing-dish standard: canned peas bound in a quick white sauce, made at table over a spirit lamp. The transcription runs on into two neighbouring recipes, so read only the first three sentences as the creamed peas.
- The blazerThe blazer is the shallow upper pan of a chafing dish, set either directly over the flame or above the hot-water bath. Any small heavy skillet or saucepan does the same work on a modern burner.
- Why the peas are rinsed and scaldedEarly canned peas carried a strong tinny, brine-heavy liquor, hence the drain, boiling-water rinse and second drain. Modern canned peas need only draining and a rinse; frozen peas, thawed, can be used straight and taste closer to the fresh peas this dish imitates.
- Cook the flour before the liquidTwo tablespoons butter to one of flour is a loose roux. Let it bubble half a minute before the milk goes in, or the sauce tastes of raw flour — there is very little cooking time afterward.
- Liquid is scantOne-third cup of milk for a can of peas gives a coating sauce, not a soup. Add it gradually and expect to loosen it with another spoonful or two if it tightens over the flame.
- Do not hold it longCanned peas are already fully cooked. Once the sauce bubbles the dish is done; sustained heat over the lamp turns them grey and mealy.
- The sugarA teaspoon of sugar is doing real work here, restoring sweetness lost in the can. With frozen peas it can be cut by half or dropped.
- YieldAbout two cups; three or four servings as a side, or two on toast as a light supper dish.
- On the fragments that followThe purée of fish reheats leftover cooked white fish with canned salmon in a milk sauce and yields three pints. Anything of that kind should be brought fully to a boil and served at once rather than kept warm over a lamp.
Chafing-dish cookery had a real vogue in American households around 1900, and books like this one served it: the appeal was cooking at the table, in front of guests, and chafing dishes were a common wedding gift of the period. That constraint shaped the recipes — one shallow pan, a weak flame, little or no recourse to the oven, and a strong preference for ingredients already cooked. Canned peas fit perfectly. Commercial canning of vegetables had become cheap and widespread in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and peas were among the more successful lines, and period cookbooks not uncommonly instruct the cook to rinse the packing liquid away with boiling water before doing anything else. Creamed vegetables — anything bound in a butter-and-flour white sauce — were a standard American treatment of the era, applied to peas, onions, celery, potatoes and dried beef alike.