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Boiled Peas
Remove peas from pods, cover with cold water, and let stand one-half hour. Skim off undeveloped peas which rise to top of water, and drain remaining peas. Cook until soft in a small quantity of boiling water, adding salt the last fifteen minutes of cooking. (Consult Time Table for Cooking, p. 28). There should be but little, if any, water to drain from peas when they are cooked. Season with butter, salt, and pepper. If peas have lost much of their natural sweetness, they are improved by the addition of a small amount of sugar.
Fannie Farmer is writing about peas shelled that morning from a farm or market stall, which behave very differently from the frozen peas most cooks now use. The method still works, but the timing assumptions do not.
- Cooking timeThe book's time table allows a long boil for peas, far longer than modern practice, reflecting peas picked large and starchy. Young shelled peas need 3 to 5 minutes in boiling water; frozen peas need 2 to 3. Cook them to the point where they still resist the tooth slightly.
- The half-hour soakThis is a sorting step, not a soaking step. Immature and shrivelled peas float and are skimmed off. With modern uniform peas, or anything frozen, skip it entirely.
- Salt at the endFarmer adds salt only in the last fifteen minutes; the text gives no reason, though salt was often said to toughen skins over a long boil. With a five-minute cook, salt the water from the start.
- "A small quantity of boiling water"Roughly half an inch in the pan. The text asks only that there be little, if any, water left to drain when the peas are done; it does not say whether to cover the pan.
- The sugarPeas begin converting sugar to starch the moment they are picked, which is what the last line is addressing. A quarter teaspoon of sugar per pound of shelled peas restores some of that. Frozen peas, blanched within hours of picking, rarely need it.
- YieldOne pound of peas in the pod gives roughly a cup of shelled peas, enough for two as a side dish. Reckon three pounds in the pod for four to six people.
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) belongs to the moment when American domestic cookery was being rewritten around measurement and timing, and its vegetable chapter reads accordingly: exact water levels, a time table cross-reference, a rule for when to add salt. What it cannot standardise is the pea itself, and the final sentence gives the game away. Before commercial freezing, garden peas reached the kitchen at wildly different stages of maturity, and the sugar-to-starch conversion after picking is fast enough that a day's delay is tasteable. This recipe at least suggests a cook judging peas by size and skin, and sweetening the pot when the crop had sat too long, though how far such habits extended beyond this one page is not something a single recipe can tell us. Clarence Birdseye's flash-freezing work in the 1920s did more for the flavour of the average bowl of peas than any refinement of the boiling method ever could.