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Carrots and Peas with Green Mint
I very small bunch fresh mint
Salt and pepper
2 cups cooked cubed carrots
Butter
1 cup cooked peas
Sugar
Boil together carrots, peas and mint leaves for five minutes. Drain, add salt and pepper, a generous amount of butter, and sprinkle with sugar. Set in the oven until the sugar melts. Serve with a garnish of fresh mint leaves.
A brief, workable side dish from a period when vegetables were routinely boiled twice — once to cook, once to season. The second boil is the part worth rethinking.
- The hinge: don't boil twiceThe carrots and peas are already cooked; five more minutes of boiling leaves the peas grey and the carrot cubes soft to the point of collapse. Warm them through in a covered pan with a splash of water and the mint for two minutes instead, then drain.
- PeasIn period practice these would have been shelled fresh peas boiled until quite soft. Frozen peas need only a minute or two from frozen and are closer to what a modern palate expects.
- The mintWhole leaves boiled with the vegetables give a faint background flavour and then have to be fished out. Chopping half the leaves in with the butter at the end gives more mint for the same bunch; keep the rest whole for the garnish.
- "A generous amount of butter"Read this as 2 to 3 tablespoons for the three cups of vegetables. It is meant to form a glaze rather than sit on top.
- The sugarRoughly a teaspoon, sprinkled to melt into the butter — this is a light glaze, not a sweetened dish. Modern carrot varieties are generally bred sweeter than older ones, so start with less.
- "Set in the oven"No temperature is given. 350F for three or four minutes is enough to melt the sugar; a low broiler or simply swirling the pan over heat does the same job faster.
- YieldThree cups of dressed vegetables serves four as a side.
Butterick, best known for dress patterns, published household books aimed at the middle-class woman running a home without much staff. Mint with peas is long-standing English practice, generally explained by mint's habit of thriving in the same kitchen gardens where peas were grown and coming ready at the same season. The sprinkle of sugar melted under heat recalls the older glazing technique, in which root vegetables were finished in butter and sugar to gloss them — a treatment applied to carrots, turnips and onions alike in nineteenth-century cookery.