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Green Pease
Wash lightly two quarts shelled pease, put into boiling water enough to cover, boil twenty minutes, add pepper, salt, and more hot water if needed to prevent burning, and two table-spoons butter rubbed into two of flour; stir well, and boil five minutes. If pods are clean and fresh, boil first in water to give flavor, skim out and put in pease. Canned pease should be rinsed before cooking.
A plain nineteenth-century treatment of fresh peas, thickened at the end with a butter-and-flour paste. The one thing to change is the timing.
- The twenty-five minute boilThe twenty-five minutes in total -- twenty minutes' boiling, then five more after the thickening -- reflects the varieties and handling of the period, when peas were likely to be starchier by the time they reached the pot. Modern shelled peas, and certainly frozen ones, are tender in three to five minutes; twenty-five will leave them grey and mealy. Cook to just-tender, then add the thickening and give it one minute.
- Quantity and yieldTwo quarts of shelled peas is roughly 2 1/2 to 3 lb, which needs something like 6-8 lb of peas in the pod. It serves eight generously. Frozen peas substitute directly by volume.
- Butter rubbed into flourThis is beurre manié — equal parts soft butter and flour worked to a paste, dropped into the simmering liquid so it disperses without lumping. Two tablespoons of each will lightly bind the small amount of cooking water left, not make a sauce. Do not add it to a pan still holding a quart of water.
- The pod stockThe instruction to boil the clean pods first and skim them out is the best idea in the recipe and still worth doing. Pods give a sweet, distinctly green stock; simmer them fifteen minutes, fish them out, and cook the peas in that water.
- Water level"Boiling water enough to cover" plus the later thickening assumes most of the liquid cooks away. Start with just enough to cover and leave the lid off, or you will be thickening a pot of broth.
- SaltThe original adds pepper and salt partway through. Salting the water from the start seasons the peas better; there is no truth to the old idea that salt toughens their skins.
- Canned peasThe rinsing note still applies — canning liquid is dull and often heavily salted. Canned peas are already fully cooked, so they need only to be heated through in the thickened butter.
- "Pease"Not a misprint. The older English form was pease, singular and plural alike; "pea" was back-formed from it. Cookbooks kept the old spelling well into the late nineteenth century.
The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to a family of compiled American household manuals of the 1880s, assembled largely from contributed receipts and aimed at a Southern readership, and its vegetable chapter reflects what is often said to have been the general practice of the day: boil hard, season at the end, bind with flour and butter. Green peas were among the most seasonal things in the nineteenth-century kitchen hey had they were picked, and their sugar turned to starch within hours, a fact sometimes offered to explain why the older cookbooks call for such long cooking. The trick of simmering the empty pods to make the cooking liquid is a thrift measure of the same era, and it survives in modern kitchens as pea-pod stock for risotto and soup. The line about canned peas is a small marker of when the book was written: commercial canning had become cheap enough by the 1880s that a household cookbook had to account for it alongside the fresh vegetable.