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Green Pea Salad
Shell two breakfast cupfuls of peas, put them in a saucepan with a lump of butter the size of an egg and a very little water and boil slowly until tender, stirring constantly. When done take them off the fire and leave them until cold. Thoroughly wash and drain a nice lettuce, pull the leaves apart and put them into a salad-bowl. Chop some cold remains of roast lamb or other cold meat, spread it over the top of the lettuce and pour the peas over. Prepare a plain salad-dressing with oil, vinegar, a few chopped tarragon and mint leaves, and season with pepper and salt. Pour the dressing over the salad, toss it lightly, and serve.
A late-Victorian composed salad that treats yesterday's roast as an asset rather than a leftover. Nearly everything in it hinges on cooking the peas in butter rather than water.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Two cupfuls of shelled peas is about 10 to 12 oz, or a good 2 cups; that is around 2 lb of peas in the pod.
- Butter the size of an eggStandard Victorian shorthand for about 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. It is not excessive here: the butter and the peas' own moisture are the whole cooking medium.
- The hinge: barely any water"A very little water" means a few tablespoons at most. The peas braise in butter and steam rather than boil, which is why the constant stirring is specified. Add enough water to submerge them and you have boiled peas and a pan of buttery liquid you must throw away.
- TimingFresh young peas need roughly 6 to 10 minutes over low heat, older ones a little more; the recipe's constant stirring implies the pan is worked uncovered. Frozen peas work and need about 3 minutes.
- Cool them properlySpread the peas on a plate to cool rather than leaving them heaped in the hot pan, where they keep cooking. They should be cold before they touch the lettuce or the leaves will wilt.
- Plain salad dressingThree parts oil to one part vinegar, whisked with salt and pepper, is a common period ratio, though recipes vary. A teaspoon each of chopped tarragon and mint is plenty for this quantity; mint in particular takes over quickly.
- The cold meatRoast lamb is the obvious partner for mint, but cold roast chicken or beef works. Chop it small, about 6 to 8 oz, and bring it to room temperature so the fat is not waxy.
- YieldServes four as a lunch salad. Dress and toss at the table or immediately before serving; it does not hold.
Oscar Tschirky was never formally the chef of the Waldorf-Astoria — he was the maître d'hôtel — but his 1896 Cook Book collected some 900 pages of the hotel's working repertoire alongside plainer household cookery, and this salad belongs firmly to the second category. Composed salads built on cold roast meat were a fixture of the late-nineteenth-century luncheon table, where a Sunday joint was expected to reappear in some dignified form on Monday. The peas are cooked in the French manner, stewed in butter with almost no water rather than boiled, a technique associated with petits pois à l'étuvée; the tarragon-and-mint dressing nods to the long-standing English pairing of mint with lamb. It is a useful reminder that a book bearing a grand hotel's name was still sold to housekeepers who needed to use up a leg of lamb.