Eggs with Peas
Take one and one-half cups of green peas, and cook them with one and one-half tablespoons of good butter, and a pinch of salt. Take four hard-boiled eggs, cut them in two lengthwise, and put them on a platter; pour over them the peas as a sauce.
Eggs "alla Milanese" Hard boil four eggs, cut them in four pieces each, put them in a platter, and pour over them the following sauce:
A two-line spring dish that depends entirely on the quality of the peas and the butter. Note that the second recipe on this page breaks off before its sauce is given.
- The peas are the dishWith only butter and salt in the pan, there is nothing to hide behind. Fresh shelled peas at their sweetest are ideal; frozen petits pois are a fair substitute and better than tired fresh ones.
- How to cook themThe instruction is to cook peas in butter, not water. Melt the butter in a small saucepan, add the peas with a tablespoon or two of water, cover, and stew gently for 5-8 minutes until tender. Fresh peas of any age may want a few minutes more.
- Butter quantityA tablespoon and a half to a cup and a half of peas is generous by design; the melted butter and pea liquor together are the sauce. Do not drain.
- Egg textureBoil the eggs to just set, around 9-10 minutes for large eggs, then cool them in cold water. A chalky grey-rimmed yolk will fight the sweetness of the peas.
- TemperatureServe the peas hot over eggs that are barely warm or at room temperature. Cold-from-the-refrigerator eggs kill the dish.
- The Milanese variationThe text ends mid-sentence and the promised sauce is not given here; treat the fragment as incomplete rather than guessing at it.
- YieldFour eggs and a cup and a half of peas serve two as a light lunch, or four as an antipasto.
This comes from Simple Italian Cookery (1912), written under the pen name Antonia Isola, usually identified as Mabel Earle McGinnis, an American who had lived in Italy and set out to give English-speaking households plain Italian home dishes rather than restaurant set pieces. The book's egg chapter is characteristic: dishes like this one are essentially a way of dressing eggs with whatever the season offered. Peas stewed in butter is the standard Italian treatment still called piselli al burro. That the Milanese recipe is truncated mid-page is a reminder of how casually these small compilations were set — though here the likeliest explanation is simply that the excerpt ends at a page break.