Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Green Peas for Garnish
Green Peas for Garnish
Boil the required quantity of green peas in salted water, taking care not to cook them too much, drain, put them into a sautepan with a little butter, and toss them over the fire for a few minutes.
Puree of Green Peas for Garnish Put the peas in a saucepan with a few springs of mint and parsley, a small onion, a little salt, cover with water, and boil until tender. Drain and rub them through a fine hair-sieve, moisten with clear stock bringing them to the consistency of a thick puree. Put one ounce of butter and one teaspoonful of flour in a stewpan, mix well over the fire, then stir in the puree of peas. Stir over the fire again for two or three minutes, and when thoroughly hot they are ready to serve.
Two garnishes in one entry: buttered peas and a thickened pea puree. Both are quick, and both stand or fall on not overcooking the peas.
- Timing is the whole recipeFresh shelled peas want roughly 3-5 minutes in boiling salted water, frozen peas 2-3. The warning "not to cook them too much" is the hinge: past that point they go mealy and the colour turns grey-olive, which defeats a garnish.
- Sautepan and stewpanBoth are stovetop pans, not covered baking dishes: the sautepan shallow and wide for the butter toss, the stewpan deeper and straight-sided, so a small heavy saucepan for the puree.
- Frozen peas are fineFrozen peas are generally picked and blanched quickly after harvest and are often sweeter than fresh pods that have sat in a shop. Shell peas at their best in early summer are worth the work; at any other time use frozen.
- Hair sieveA fine sieve of woven horsehair. A fine-mesh strainer worked with a stiff rubber spatula does the same job, or run the peas through a food mill on the fine plate. A blender gives a smoother result than the original intends but no one will complain; skins are the thing to remove either way.
- The butter-and-flour stepOne ounce of butter to one teaspoon of flour is a very lean roux, there to bind rather than thicken. Cook it about a minute so it loses the raw-flour taste, then add the puree off the heat before returning it to the flame.
- Clear stockA light veal or chicken stock, unthickened and unseasoned enough to reduce. Use it warm and add it a spoonful at a time; the puree should mound softly on a spoon, not run.
- Aromatics come outThe mint, parsley and onion cooked with the peas are there for flavour only. Lift them out before sieving; the sieve would hold back most of the fibre anyway, but removing them keeps the flavour and colour clean.
- YieldThe recipe names no quantity. As a rough guide, two pounds of pods yields something like two cups of shelled peas; a pound of frozen peas rather more. Either will garnish six to eight plates.
- Hold it hot, brieflyBoth preparations lose colour on standing. Make them last, keep them covered off the heat no more than ten minutes, and reheat over low heat with a spoonful of stock rather than over a boil.
Green peas appear in Oscar Tschirky's book as part of the garnish repertoire that made a hotel kitchen work: a stock of small, standardised finishes that a cook could set beside a cutlet, a chicken breast or a saddle of lamb to complete a plate the way a menu name promised. The vocabulary is straight out of the French professional tradition — à la Saint-Germain is the classic term for a garnish or soup of pureed green peas, and the mint in the cooking liquid is the English habit grafted onto it. The hair sieve called for here was standard equipment before the domestic food mill and blender, and the instruction to pass peas through one is a reminder of how much of a Gilded Age hotel's smoothness was purchased with labour rather than machinery: a Waldorf brigade of that period presumably ran on many hands doing exactly this kind of work.