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Buttered Green Peas
Put some fresh green peas into a saucepan with a lump of butter, a little salt and a small quantity of water, cover and boil over a quick fire until tender. Knead one ounce of butter with some flour, put it in with the peas, stir them till thickened, then put in four ounces of butter broken in little pieces, one-half teaspoonful of sugar and a small quantity of grated nutmeg. Turn the peas out onto a hot dish, garnish with sippets of fried bread, and serve. Green Peas, English Style Shell and wash two quarts or more of green peas, remove the small ones, put them in a saucepan, cover with boiling water, add a handful of salt and boil quickly without covering for fifteen minutes, removing the scum as it rises. When tender strain through a colander, return them to the saucepan and toss well, adding one and one-fourth ounce of fresh butter. Dish them in a vegetable dish, place another half ounce of butter in the center, and serve. Green Peas, Peasant Style Wash a few cabbages and long lettuces, a handful of parsley and three or four green onions, cut them into shreds and put them into a saucepan with three quarts of green peas and a piece of butter; cover the pan and let them cook over a very slow fire without any other moisture, stirring occasionally to prevent their burning. When well cooked season with pepper and salt, turn them onto a hot dish, and serve.
Three treatments of the same vegetable, written when peas came in the pod and were cooked far longer than anyone would cook them now. The butter quantities are not typos; this is hotel cooking.
- Frozen peas change everythingOscar was working with hand-shelled garden peas, often picked mature, which want real cooking. Good frozen peas are blanched at harvest and need two to three minutes at most in any of these three methods. Fresh peas from a farm stand want four to six minutes.
- Fifteen minutes is too longThe English-style boil of fifteen minutes will turn frozen peas to mush and dull fresh ones to olive drab. Boil hard in well-salted water and taste at three minutes.
- "A handful of salt"More than a modern cook would use; season the water as you would pasta water, roughly a tablespoon per quart. The peas are drained, so most of it goes down the sink.
- A quick fireFull heat under a covered pan. The first recipe calls for only a small quantity of water, so use a wide pan and a few tablespoons, but leave enough liquid behind for the kneaded butter and flour to thicken.
- Kneaded butter and flourEssentially beurre mani u00e9: one ounce of butter, about two tablespoons, worked to a paste with flour (conventionally about an equal volume; the recipe just says 'some'). Add it in small pieces and stir over gentle heat until the liquid coats the peas; it turns pasty if dumped in as a lump.
- Four ounces of butterA full stick, on top of the ounce already kneaded with flour, for what is probably a quart of peas serving four to six. Halving it gives a sauce most modern palates prefer, but the emulsion is the point of the dish.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread fried in butter until crisp, arranged round the edge of the dish. Croutons cut a little larger than usual do the same job.
- Peasant style is a braise, not a boilNo water goes in at all; the cabbage, lettuce and onions release enough moisture to steam the peas. Keep the heat genuinely low, use a heavy pan with a tight lid, and stir every few minutes or the sugars in the peas will catch and scorch.
- QuantitiesTwo quarts of pods yields roughly two cups of shelled peas, so the English-style recipe as written serves four. The three quarts in the peasant version, if that means shelled peas, is a party dish; three quarts of pods is the more likely reading.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf from 1893, the Astoria wing following in 1897, and his 1896 Cook Book is a compendium of the international hotel repertoire as New York practised it. The three versions here map that repertoire neatly: a butter-thickened French service with sippets, a plain boiled English one, and the one the book heads "Peasant Style", a country braise of peas with lettuce, onion, shredded cabbage and no added liquid. Nutmeg on peas looks odd now, though it is often said to have been a common seasoning for buttered vegetables. All three recipes assume fresh peas in their brief early-summer season, shelled by hand in the kitchen, with the English-style recipe telling the cook to pick out the small ones and set them aside; the commercial freezing that made peas a year-round vegetable was still a generation away.