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Creamed Peas
Drain Boiled Peas, and to two cups peas add three-fourths cup White Sauce II. Canned peas are often drained, rinsed, and reheated in this way.
A two-line recipe that assumes you have already read two other pages of the book. Everything hinges on what White Sauce II is and on not cooking the peas twice.
- White Sauce IIFarmer graded her white sauces by thickness, and this recipe simply points to the second grade; the exact butter, flour and milk proportions are set out on the sauce page rather than here, so take them from there. Three-fourths cup is most of a batch built on one cup of milk.
- Cook the roux outLet the butter and flour bubble together a full minute or two before the milk goes in. A sauce this plain has nowhere to hide raw flour.
- Boiled peasThe referenced "Boiled Peas" means shelled fresh peas simmered in salted water until just tender; the book's own timing is longer than the five to eight minutes a modern cook would give young peas. Frozen peas substitute directly and want only two or three minutes.
- The peas are already cookedFold them into the finished hot sauce and warm through for a minute at most. Simmering peas in the sauce turns them grey-green and mealy, which is what most creamed peas suffer from.
- Canned peasThe rinsing step in the last line matters more now than it reads. Canned peas sit in salty, slightly metallic liquid; drain, rinse under cold water, and hold back some of the salt in the sauce until you have tasted it.
- YieldTwo cups of peas with this much sauce serves four as a side dish. Doubling the sauce, which is tempting, gives you soup.
- SeasoningThe original stops at whatever salt and pepper the sauce carries. A grating of nutmeg, a little sugar with older peas, or chopped mint or chervil stirred in at the end all sit within the period.
Creamed vegetables were the backbone of the American table when Fannie Farmer was teaching, and the Boston Cooking-School method was to standardise a handful of white sauces by proportion and then apply them across the whole vegetable chapter. That is why this entry is three sentences: the work was done elsewhere in the book, and the student was expected to know which grade of sauce went with what. The nod to canned peas is worth noticing. By the turn of the twentieth century canned peas were cheap and year-round, and often said to have been distrusted for their flat taste and green tint, with a milk sauce serving as what seems to have been a common domestic remedy. The recipe also reflects an era before quick freezing, when fresh garden peas were a few weeks of summer and everything else came in a tin.