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Fresh Peas
Fresh peas should not be shelled until just before they are needed for cooking. Look them over carefully after shelling, taking out any tendrils that may have gotten in with them; place them in a kettle with just sufficient boiling salted water to cover, and boil slowly until tender. Young peas will cook in twenty minutes, but those that are more mature require twice that time. The water should not be drained from them when done; if nicely apportioned, there will be, when the cooking is finished, only enough to serve with the peas. Add butter, salt and pepper, and serve hot.
A sound method with one badly outdated instruction. The technique of cooking peas in barely enough water to serve as their own sauce is worth keeping; the twenty-to-forty-minute boil is not.
- The timing is the problemFresh young peas are tender in three to five minutes of simmering, not twenty. Forty minutes turns them grey-green and mealy. Taste one at three minutes and go from there.
- Why the book says fortyPeas were shelled from whatever came in from the garden or market, and some of it would have been well past the young stage. Genuinely mature peas do need long cooking, but they will never taste like young ones; treat them as you would a fresh shell bean rather than a spring vegetable.
- Barely enough waterThe recipe says water just sufficient to cover, and trusts you to have judged the quantity so that only a serving-spoonful remains. Less water than that, say a quarter inch with the lid on, makes the unstrained finish easier to hit; much more and you get pea soup with the peas still in it.
- YieldOne pound of peas in the pod gives roughly a cup of shelled peas, enough for two as a side dish. Three pounds of pods serves four to six generously.
- Shell late, as instructedThis is the one piece of advice in the recipe that modern practice fully endorses. Sugars in peas convert to starch quickly after picking, and faster still once the pod is opened. Refrigerate them in the pod and shell at the stove.
- Frozen peas are not a compromiseCommercially frozen peas are blanched within hours of picking and will beat market fresh peas that have travelled. They need only about two minutes in a splash of water with the butter.
- FinishingTwo tablespoons of butter to a pound of shelled peas, off the heat, swirled until it emulsifies with the remaining cooking water. A pinch of sugar helps late-season peas; mint or a little cream are both period-appropriate additions.
Butterick published its cook book in 1911 as an extension of a dressmaking-pattern empire, and its vegetable chapter reads as instruction for a household with a cook rather than a chef: how to handle what the garden or the greengrocer sent up, in season, without much fuss. Fresh peas were emphatically seasonal in that world, arriving in late spring and gone by midsummer, and the distinction the recipe draws between young and mature peas mattered because a cook had no control over which she received. The habit of long boiling for green vegetables persisted in Anglo-American kitchens well into the twentieth century and is often said to have receded with the spread of home freezers and commercially frozen vegetables, which made brief cooking both possible and obviously better. The advice to shell at the last moment shows that cooks understood the behaviour of peas by observation.