No. 2744

Green Peas, Housekeeper's Style

Petits Pois a la Menagere

Take half a pound of lean unsmoked bacon cut in quarter-inch squares; blanch, drain and put them into a saucepan with four ounces of butter; fry the bacon colorless, then add a spoonful of flour and when this begins to brown moisten with a quart of stock (No. 194a); add three quarts of shelled fresh peas, a bunch of parsley and three green onions. When the peas are done remove the parsley and onion, drain off the stock, thicken it with a little kneaded butter (No. 579) and pass it through a sieve; put it back with the peas, boil both together again and remove from the fire; thicken with egg-yolks diluted in cream, at the same time incorporating a piece of fresh butter.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A classic French pea braise scaled for a hotel kitchen: Ranhofer's quantities feed a dozen or more. The finish is where it can fail — the egg-yolk liaison must never see a boil.

The hinge: the liaisonAfter the peas and thickened stock come back together, pull the pan from the heat before stirring in the yolks beaten with cream. Yolks curdle above roughly 180F, and a single boil after they go in will leave grainy flecks through the sauce.
"Lean unsmoked bacon"He means a mild salt-cured belly, not modern smoked breakfast bacon, which would dominate the peas. Pancetta or unsmoked salt pork cut in quarter-inch dice is the closest match; the blanching step draws off excess salt, so do not skip it even with today's milder cures.
Quantities and yieldThree quarts of shelled peas is roughly 3.5 to 4 lb, which takes something like 9 to 10 lb of peas in the pod. This serves twelve to sixteen as a side dish; quartering it is reasonable, and the butter and stock scale down proportionally.
The stockNo. 194a is one of Ranhofer's basic stocks; a good unsalted chicken or light veal stock stands in.
Kneaded butterRanhofer's No. 579 is beurre mani ogether together raked raw together. Corrected: Ranhofer's No. 579 is beurre mani atogether raw together. Use: Kneaded butter -- Ranhofer's No. 579 is beurre mani aw, butter and flour worked together raw — usually equal weights of soft butter and flour kneaded to a paste, whisked into the simmering liquid in small pinches to thicken it without cooking out a fresh roux.
Cooking timeFresh garden peas want 8 to 15 minutes in the stock depending on size and age; taste rather than time them. Frozen peas need 3 to 4 minutes and should go in only after the stock has been thickened and sieved, or they will collapse.
Green onionsNineteenth-century "green onions" here are young spring onions, bulb and top, added whole so they can be lifted out with the parsley.
StrainingPassing the thickened stock through a sieve catches any lumps from the kneaded butter — do it into a clean bowl, then return it to the peas rather than tipping the peas into it.

A Little History

This is one of a run of pea preparations in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium of the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, where Ranhofer was chef for over thirty years. à la ménagère means "housekeeper's style" or "housewife's style," a label French cooking used for homely, unrefined treatments — here the peas are stretched with bacon and bound with flour. The joke of the name is that Ranhofer's version is still finished with four ounces of butter, an egg-and-cream liaison and a sieved sauce; a genuine household cook would have stopped several steps earlier. Fresh peas were strictly seasonal in the 1890s and a marker of a good spring table, which is why a book of this kind returns to them again and again.