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Stewed Green Peas with Bacon
Remove the rind from four ounces of streaky bacon, cut the bacon into small pieces, blanch them for a few minutes, then drain, put them in a saucepan with one ounce of butter and fry for five minutes; put a tablespoonful of flour in with the bacon, stir it over the fire for a few minutes, then add one quart of young green peas, one onion, and one pint of water. Bring it to a boil, cover the saucepan, move it to the side of the fire, and cook slowly for half an hour; take the onion out, skin the fat off the liquor, add salt and pepper to taste, turn all into a hot dish, and serve.
Stewed Green Peas with Spanish Sauce Put some young peas in an earthenware pan with a small piece of butter and plenty of fresh water; rub them well with the hands and drain. Put them in a stewpan with a bunch of parsley and two or three green onions, cover close, and let them sweat. When nearly done pour in with the peas one and one-half teacupfuls of Spanish sauce, season with sugar and salt, skim off all the fat, and boil the sauce till reduced; thicken it with the beaten yolks of two eggs, and serve. This is a very delicious dish, and should be freely garnished with a border of small croutons of bread fried in bacon fat.
Two related preparations sit in one paragraph here: a peasant-style stew of peas with bacon, and a richer version finished with brown sauce and egg yolks. Both assume peas shelled that morning, which is the main thing modern shopping has to work around.
- The half hour is for old peasThe half hour is long for young peas -- Garden peas picked and shelled the same day cook in 8 to 12 minutes; frozen peas need 3 to 5. Thirty minutes of stewing turns them grey and mealy, whatever the original says. Build the bacon-and-flour base first, let it simmer with the onion and water for 20 minutes to make a sauce, then add the peas near the end.
- A quart of peasThe original does not say whether the measure is shelled or in the pod. Read it as shelled: a quart is 4 cups, about 1¼ to 1½ lb, which needs roughly 3 lb of pods. A 1 lb bag of frozen petits pois is the practical substitute.
- Streaky baconStreaky is British for what an American market sells as ordinary sliced bacon, cut from the belly. Period recipes often blanch bacon, plausibly because it was more heavily salted and smoked than ours; with modern bacon it mostly mutes the smoke and the cure. Skip it if you want the bacon flavour forward, keep it if you want the peas to dominate.
- "Move it to the side of the fire"On a coal range the centre was hottest and the edges cooler. It means reduce to a bare simmer, lid on.
- Spanish sauceSauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce of veal stock, mirepoix and browned roux. Nothing in a supermarket corresponds to it. A well-reduced brown veal or beef stock, lightly thickened, is the nearest honest stand-in.
- TeacupfulAround 6 fluid ounces in this period, so one and one-half teacupfuls is roughly 1 to 1¼ cups.
- The egg yolks are the hingeOnce the yolks go in, the sauce must not boil or it will scramble into threads. Take the pan off the heat, temper the yolks with a ladle of hot sauce, stir them back, and hold it below a simmer.
- "Let them sweat"Peas, parsley and green onions in a tightly covered pan over low heat, cooking in their own moisture with no added liquid; the butter is used in the earthenware washing pan and only what clings carries over. Little water remains after the rubbing and draining, so the heat has to stay gentle or the pan scorches.
- YieldThe first version, on a quart of peas, serves four as a vegetable course alongside a roast; the second gives no quantity, so scale it to match.
Peas stewed with bacon and a thickening of flour are a long-standing French vegetable treatment, related to what menus later called petits pois à la française, where lettuce and spring onions do the work the onion does here. Oscar Tschirky's book gathers this sort of thing wholesale: the Waldorf kitchen of the 1890s ran on classical French method, and its cooks would have been expected to know the mother sauces by name, which is why Spanish sauce appears with no more explanation than a measurement. The second version, with its espagnole and egg-yolk liaison and its border of croutons fried in bacon fat, is the same vegetable dressed for the dining room rather than the servants' hall.