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Flemish Peas
Cook some young peas and some carrots (scraped and shaped into cones) in separate pans. Then put them together in an earthenware close covered pan to simmer together in butter and gravy, the first water having been well drained from them. Season with pepper and salt and let them cook gently for ten or twelve minutes; do not uncover the pot to stir it, but shake it every now and then to prevent the contents from burning.
A two-vegetable braise that depends on cooking the peas and carrots separately, then finishing them together in fat and stock. The only difficulty is judging the first cooking so the second does not overshoot.
- The hinge: undercook the first boilThe recipe only says to cook and drain, but since both vegetables get a second ten to twelve minutes in butter and gravy, it makes sense to lift them from the water while still firm — young peas after a couple of minutes, carrots after five or six, depending on size. Peas already boiled soft are likely to break up in the covered pan.
- "Gravy"In this period the word means meat stock or the pan juices from a roast, not a thickened sauce. Two or three tablespoons of good beef or chicken stock is enough; the butter and the vegetables' own moisture do the rest.
- Shaped into conesThe carrots are cut down to small tapered pieces — the old "turned" cut — so they cook evenly and look uniform. Batons or thick coins of even size behave the same way in the pan; the cone is presentation.
- Earthenware close-covered panA small heavy pot with a tight lid, used here for gentle even heat. Any heavy saucepan with a well-fitting lid works; on a gas flame use the lowest setting or a diffuser, since earthenware heats slowly and evenly where thin metal is quicker to scorch — earthenware itself does not take direct flame or sudden temperature changes well.
- Don't uncover, do shakeStirring breaks the peas and lets the steam out; shaking the closed pan moves everything without bruising it. Take the pan off the heat for a moment if it starts to catch.
- Young peasFresh peas of the size intended here are briefly in season and quickly starchy. Frozen petits pois are closer to the original than most fresh supermarket peas, and need only to be thawed and warmed rather than boiled first.
- QuantityThe recipe gives none. Roughly 1 lb shelled peas to 8 oz carrots with 2 oz butter serves four as a side dish.
Cook each vegetable to its own point, then bring them together in butter — a logic not far from the wider family of Belgian dishes cooked à l'étuvée, sweated close-covered rather than boiled. The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in Britain during the First World War, when some quarter of a million Belgian refugees were living there; its recipes are said to have been gathered from those households, with sales reportedly going to relief funds. That origin explains the book's habits — no oven times, few weights, an assumption that the cook knows what peas look like when they are done, and a reliance on the drippings and stock any thrifty kitchen already had. Carrots turned into cones for a plain family dish is a reminder that even Belgian domestic cooking, here recorded in wartime, kept its eye on the look of the plate.