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Pease Stewed in Cream
Put two or three pints of young green pease into a sauce-panor boiling water; when nearly done and tender, drain in a colander, quite dry; melt two ounces of butter in a clean stew-pan, thicken evenly with a little flour, shake it over the fire, but do not let it. brown, mix smoothly with a gill of cream, add half a tea-spoon of white sugar, bring to a boil, pour in the pease, keep moving for two minutes until well heated, and serve hot. The sweet pods of young pease are made by the Germans into a palatable dish by simply stewing with a little butter and savory herbs. -Mrs. W. A. Croffut. How To BOIL RICE.
Rice should be carefully picked over, washed in warm water, rubbed between the hands, and then rinsed several times in cold water till white. Put one tea-cupful in a tin pan or porcelain kettle, add one quart boiling water; boil fifteen minutes, not stirring, but taking care that it does not burn; add one tea-spoon salt, pour into a dish and send to table, placing a lump of butter in the center. Cooked thus the kernels remain whole.
To boil rice in milk, put a pint rice into nearly two quarts of cold milk an hour before dinner, add two tea-spoons salt, boil very slowly and stir often; cook on back part of stove or range so as to avoid burning, and take it up into a mold or bowl wet in cold water a short time before serving.
Or, after cooking, drain carefully, stir in two well-beaten eggs, one table-spoon grated cheese, half a table-spoon butter, half a tea-spoon salt; bake a few minutes in shallow pans. Some soak rice an hour or two before cooking.
A straightforward creamed pea dish, printed here with an unrelated rice entry running on directly beneath it — the two are separate recipes that ran together in the setting of the page.
- A gill of creamA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). With two ounces of butter and a spoonful of flour, that gives a thick, coating sauce rather than a pourable one.
- How many peasTwo to three pints of shelled peas is on the order of 1.5 to 2 lb shelled, which would need something like three to five pounds of peas in the pod. Frozen petits pois are a fair substitute and will need only a few minutes in the water.
- Do not brown the rouxThe instruction to shake it over the fire "but do not let it brown" is the hinge. A blond roux keeps the sauce pale and sweet; any colour at all pulls the dish toward gravy.
- Drain them quite dryWater clinging to the peas thins the cream sauce and it will not re-thicken in the two minutes of reheating given. Drain well and let them steam off in the colander for a moment.
- The two-minute reheatPeas go on cooking in a hot sauce. Two minutes is correct and generous; longer and young peas turn grey-green and mealy.
- The sugarHalf a teaspoon reads as seasoning rather than sweetening; it may have been intended to make up for peas that had sat since picking. With modern frozen peas it can be left out.
- Pea podsThe German dish described at the end would want genuinely young, tender pods. The nearest modern shop equivalent is sugar snaps or mangetout, though those are distinct edible-podded varieties rather than the same thing. Mature shelling-pea pods are fibrous and will not soften.
- The rice that followsEverything from 'How to Boil Rice' onward is a separate entry. It gives a teacupful of rice to a quart of boiling water for fifteen minutes, with no draining step mentioned; that ratio and timing suit long-grain white rice, not brown or parboiled.
- YieldServes six to eight as a side.
Creamed peas belong to the late nineteenth-century American vegetable table, where a butter-and-flour sauce bound with cream was a common dress for green vegetables — a technique owing much to French white sauce and simplified for households cooking on a range. The Dixie Cook-Book gathered its contributions by name, and Mrs. W. A. Croffut's note on the German use of pea pods is characteristic of the period's interest in thrift: the pods were ordinarily thrown out, and a writer who could point to a European precedent for eating them was offering both economy and a touch of cosmopolitan authority. The spelling "pease" was already old-fashioned when this was printed; it is the older English form, singular in origin, from which the modern "pea" was back-formed.