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Boiled Green Peas
Shell one peck of fresh green peas, wash them in water, put them into two quarts of boiling water with one tablespoonful of salt and boil fast until they are tender (they should take about ten minutes), then drain, season with salt, pepper and butter, and serve at once. If the peas are to be served with lamb a small bunch of green mint should be boiled with them. Parsley and young onions are sometimes boiled with green peas when their flavor is desired, and frequently a little sugar is added to sweeten them.
Green Peas, Bourgeoise Select the required quantity of young peas, put them into a stewpan with butter, allowing eight ounces to every quart of peas; add also the washed heart of a large lettuce, a bunch of parsley, a few small onions and a little salt. Moisten with a little broth and cook slowly until tender. Stir in the beaten yolks of two eggs and one teaspoonful of sugar, but do not boil after the eggs are added. Turn the peas onto a hot dish, and serve.
Two treatments of the same vegetable: a plain boil and the richer French braise Oscar calls Bourgeoise. Both were written for peas picked that morning, which is the whole difficulty in reproducing them.
- A peck of peasA peck is 8 dry quarts of pods, on the order of 7-8 lb, which shells out to roughly 2 1/2-3 1/2 lb of peas. That is a side dish for eight or more; halve or quarter it for a household.
- Ten minutes is too long nowTen minutes may be too long now -- the timing suits fuller, starchier peas. Shelled peas from a supermarket, and frozen peas especially, are usually tender in 2-4 minutes of fast boiling. Taste at two minutes and drain the moment they lose their raw crunch.
- Frozen peas are the honest substitutePeas begin converting sugar to starch within hours of picking, so unless you have a garden or a farm stand, frozen petits pois will be closer to what this recipe assumes than fresh pods in a shell.
- Salt the water, not much elseA tablespoon of salt to two quarts is about right. Add the mint, parsley or young onions as whole sprigs and bunches so they can be lifted out before serving.
- The butter in the BourgeoiseEight ounces (two sticks) per quart of peas is a period restaurant ratio. Four ounces per quart makes a sauce that still coats without pooling; more than that and the dish reads as butter with peas in it.
- Stewpan means saucepanA stewpan is a straight-sided pan with a lid, used on the stovetop. Keep the braise at a bare simmer with only a splash of broth; the lettuce and onions release enough liquid to finish the cooking.
- The hinge: do not boil after the yolksThe yolks are there to bind, and they set into curds above roughly 180F. Pull the pan off the heat, stir in the yolks with a spoonful of the hot cooking liquid first, then return it briefly to very low heat, swirling, until it thickens.
- The lettuceUse the tight inner heart of a romaine or butterhead, shredded or left in wedges. It is not a garnish; it melts down and gives the braise its body and faint sweetness.
Green peas were a luxury vegetable in Europe from the seventeenth century onward, and the fuss over them at Versailles under Louis XIV is one of the better-documented food crazes of the period. The second recipe here is a version of what French kitchens call petits pois à la française -- peas stewed in butter with lettuce, small onions and parsley, the water kept to almost nothing so the peas cook in their own steam. "Bourgeoise" in nineteenth-century menu French signals a homely, family-style preparation rather than a formal garnish, though the eight ounces of butter per quart shows how relative that homeliness was in a hotel kitchen. Oscar Tschirky's book collects the working repertoire of the Waldorf around 1896, and pages like this one -- a plain boil, then the same vegetable dressed up, with notes on mint for lamb -- are recipes that double as a line cook's reference for whatever the dining room ordered.